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an Blake in 
This World 


by 
Harold Bruce 


KI 





New York 
Harcourt, Brace and Company 





coPpyRIGHT, 1925, By — 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPA 


. First Edition 


PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY 





Vil 


XI 


Contents 


William Blake in Limbo / 
William Blake in This World 6 
A Firm Persuasion That a Thing Is So 8 
The Divinity of Yes and No Too 23 
Dark Satanic Mills 39 
Genius Cannot Be Bound 52 
Self-Portrait of the Undistracted Dancer 78 
The Neurotic and the Stupid 6&9 
A Bosom Secure from Tumultuous Passions 102 
The Heart of the Mystery 109 
A The Spectators in the Sky 112 
B The Poem Dictated by Authors in Eternity 131 
C The Spectators on the Earth 149 
Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 191 
Table of Sources 220 
Index 228 





ILLUSTRATIONS 


I want! I want! Frontispiece 
Catherine 
“And I love you,” said the honest girl 14 
Flaxman 
One who preferred living to starving 57 
Blake by Flaxman 
If he will only condescend to give attention to his 
worldly concerns 62 
Fuseli by Flaxman 
He swears so 66 
Hayley 
Your ever affectionate and afflicted hermit 93 
Linnell 
Really anxious to fathom the truth 161 
Crabb Robinson 
No power beyond that of a logical understand- 
ing 165 
Blake by Phillips 


I closed the book and cried, “Aye! ‘Who can paint 
an angel?” 179 


Blake and Varley 

Sagittarius crossing Taurus 209 
Blake at Hampstead 

None now to give him scorn 21/2 
Chart 218 





WILLIAM BLAKE IN 
THIS WORLD 


I 
William Blake in Limbo 


N 1757 William Blake was born in London; 
in 1827 he died there; where he has been 
since 1827 I do not know. Others do not share 
my ignorance. They suggest that from the 
shadows he is directing their pens; that they 
catch “some impulse . . . perhaps straight from 
Blake;” that an “image of the man has risen” in 
their minds; that his spirit was “transfused” into 
Walt Whitman; that “the real Blake is yet with us, 
his posterity, as he was with Catherine, his widow.” 
The twilight of their suggestions falls too across 
his life and works. He “went astray in only a 
single particular—in being born on this earth;” he 
was “thrown by chance . . . out of the world of 
eternity into that of time and space, to appear there 
for an instant and then return to his true dwell- 
ing;” therefore “the time and place of his coming 
1 


William Blake in T his World 


to earth are of small importance.” “A cultured 
person must belong to ‘the world inside’ if he 
would grasp the real meaning of any one of Blake’s 
poems or pictures.” ‘It needs the insight of the 
mystic to understand the mystic soul of William 
Blake.” Finally, wings are clapped on a ghost 
suspected of a cloven hoof. As one of Shelley’s 
biographers fondly dwells on how Shelley, if he 
had been better used, might have sat “clothed and 
in hisright mind . . . at the feet of Jesus,” so one 
of Blake’s biographers believes that Blake, if he 
could have lived for another three score years, 
“would have reached the catholic form of Christi- 
nity,” and another takes “unspeakable pleasure” 
in asserting that though Blake “did not for the last 
forty years attend any place of Divine worship, 
yet he was not a Frreethinker.” 

I am lost in this limbo. I take no comfort in 
imagining that he has left the “Golden House” 
he described, 


above ‘Time’s troubled fountains, 
On the great Atlantic Mountains, 


to sit at the elbows of his biographers or to loaf 

across America inside the skin of Walt Whitman. 

The time and place of his coming to earth were to 
2 


William Blake in Limbo 


him, I suspect, of decisive importance; he had to 
work at the time of Sir Joshua Reynolds, not at 
the time of Michael Angelo; he had to pay the 
bills at Hercules Buildings and in Fountain Court, 
no matter where his true dwelling was. I doubt 
if one must belong to the world inside to grasp the 
real meaning of a poem “written with considerable — 
vim” in which Blake said to “Widows and Maids 
and Youths also:” 


Come and be cur’d of all your pains 
In Matrimony’s Golden Cage. 


I doubt if a soul is to be understood, or a ghost 
to be saved by whitewashing. 

If I turn to detailed accounts of Blake on this 
too, too solid earth, I am still in a kind of limbo in 
which it is hard to tell where fact leaves off and ro- 
mancing begins. Thus a story “pretty extensively 
retailed about town,” and dredged up by Alex- 
ander Gilchrist, his most painstaking biographer, 
says that Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts, once 
discovered Blake and Mrs. Blake sitting naked 
in their summer house behind Hercules Build- 
ings and was welcomed by Blake, “Come in! 
it’s only Adam and Eve, you know!” This anec- 
dote, I find, as soon as published in 1863, was 

3 


William Blake in This World 


declared by surviving acquaintances of Blake to be 
a piece of unqualified romancing. Nevertheless it 
has proved too intriguing to die. A story, told by 
William Butler Yeats, that Blake’s father was a 
runaway Irishman named O’Neil, who married 
Ellen Blake and took her name, which has likewise 
proved to be without foundation, has likewise per- 
sisted. It explains so aptly Blake’s temper and his 
Celtic revolt against the despotism of fact, that it 
is difficult to let him be, as he named himself, 
“English Blake,” 


giving his body ease 
At Lambeth beneath the poplar trees. 


A story told by Edwin J. Ellis, Yeats’s collaborator 
in the study of Blake, pictures Blake and his wife 
as “poor children of the heart . . . very miser- 
able . . . lost in the labyrinth of love’s forest,” 
and tells how Blake at one time lay down on his 
bed, “choked with the love that was flung back on 
him,” while Catherine “crying out in her desola- 
tion . . . fell down ina heap by the bed. Some- 
thing else as well as her courage gave way then. 
In that cry and that heavy fall . . . we have the 
sad knowledge why this vigorous and unstained 
young couple lived childless all their lives. Cath- 
4 


William Blake in Limbo 
erine was at that moment on her way to become a 
mother.” “AII this,” says Ellis, who calls his 
book The Real Blake, “all this was so because it 
must have been.” 

To blot out the stories that are so because they 
must have been would be costly. Along with the 
episodes of Adam and Eve, of the runaway Irish- 
man, of the poor lost children of the heart, would 
go nicely consistent descriptions of the wrong an- 
cestor and of the wrong house: Ellis’s description 
of Shawn O'Neil, who “feeling an uncontrollable 
fit of rage coming on,” ordered himself buried up 
to his neck in sand, and Gilchrist’s description of 13 
Hercules Buildings, a house with a “wainscoted 
parlour, pleasant low windows, and a narrow strip 
of real garden behind, wherein grew a fine vine.” 
A lady who, “as a girl used . . . to call on the 
artist here” told Gilchrist that “Blake would on no 
account prune this vine, having a theory it was 
wrong and unnatural to prune vines.” It was 
wrong and unnatural to change the numbers on the 
houses between the time Blake lived in and the 
time Gilchrist visited Hercules Buildings, but the 
Lambeth rate-books show that it was done. 

Blake’s plea to be true to the imagination, in 
other words, has not been lost on his biographers. 

5 


II 
William Blake in This World 


O try to sift fact from romance, to try to 
erase the details of Blake’s life not backed 
by competent, material, and relevant evidence, will 
be to blur a smooth and highly-finished portrait, 
and to substitute a flawed and imperfect one, with 
lines sometimes dim, wavering, or blotted out. . 
But this portrait, traced by Blake’s own words and 
by the memories of those who knew him, however 
flawed and imperfect it turns out to be, has certain 
sharply clear lines, and is at least a partial likeness 
of him as he was. 

An outline will bring under quickest survey the 
order of Blake’s experiences, the record of his 
words and works, the list of his acquaintances. 
This outline presents in its first division the chief 
events of Blake’s life. It shows when and where 
he was thrown by chance into the world of time 
and space. He was born; he studied drawing; he 
married; he took various lodgings in London; he 
went once for three years as far as Felpham, sixty 

6 


William Blake in This World 


miles away; he died. Chance let him live three 
score years and ten, but was not prodigal to him in 
her gifts of place. In its next divisions the dia- 
gram presents Blake’s work, charts the rich tortu- 
ous vein of his genius. It shows that if in his body 
he was no Ulysses, in his mind he sailed as far as 
America and Jerusalem, as far as Heaven and 
Hell. The creative impulse which drove him on 
his mental voyages found double expression, now 
in poetry, now in drawing and engraving. The 
Tiger burns bright in one field against The 
Ancient of Days in the other; The Songs of Inno- 
cence make strange pattern with the Illustrations 
to Job. Letters and marginalia open the shutters, 
show what was, at times, going on in his mind. 
Lastly, the diagram presents Blake’s acquaintances 
in a world which, it has been suggested, was not 
his true dwelling. Companions, artists, patrons, 
quacks, friends, foes, they are the witnesses for 
him. His words and their words make the cracked 
and wavy mirror in which is reflected what is 
known of William Blake in this world. 


Ill 


A Firm Persuasion That a Thing Is So 


CROP of prophetic anecdote springs up be- 

hind every picturesque maturity. Shake- 
speare holds the horses’ heads at the theatre door; 
infant Macaulay says of his scalded leg, “Thank 
you, Madam, the agony is abated;” four-year-old 
Ruskin wants for the background of his photo- 
graph “blue hills;” and Victoria, when the Duchess 
of Kent tells her that she will one day be queen, 
clasps the Duchess’s hand and murmurs, “I will 
be good.” Once William Blake in his maturity 
had said that angels stood round his spirit, that he 
was under the direction of messengers from heaven 
daily and nightly, a crop of anecdote sprang up to 
testify that he had been in his childhood also an 
intimate of spirits. ‘You know, dear,” his wife 
said sixty-five years after the apparition, “the first 
time you saw God was when you were four years 
old, and He put his head to the window and set 
you a-screaming.” Before he was ten, it was re- 
lated after he was dead at seventy, he saw angelic 


8 


cA Firm Persuasion That a Thing Is So 


figures walking among the haymakers, saw Ezekiel 
under a tree in the fields, and at Peckham Rye saw 
a whole tree full of angels, bright wings on every 
bough. At fourteen, the story ran, he said of the 
engraver Ryland (who obliged by fulfilling the 
prophecy ), “I do not like the man’s face—it looks 
as if he will live to be hanged.” 

For more realistic and perhaps equally prophetic 
anecdotes of Blake’s childhood, in which he moves 
not among angels but among actual people, not 
among visions but among apprentices, one must 
take the testimony of a steady-going source-hunt- 
ing professor of history who once employed him; 
of an expansive young artist who was a disciple to 
him; and of a garrulous keeper of the prints in the 
British Museum who ran across him as he was 
playing the lion. 

The professor, Benjamin Heath Malkin, an Ox- 
ford man enthusiastic for a return “home to plain 
tales and first-hand authorities,” gave an account 
perhaps “derived from the artist’s own lips” of 
Blake’s “early education in art.” Malkin’s manner 
was concrete, unemotional, as became his calling 
and his enthusiasm. The expansive young artist, 
Frederick Tatham, got Blake born, married, mis- 
understood, and translated to his reward, in a Life 

9 


William Blake in This World 


of William Blake in which he turned rhapsody on 
and off like water at a tap. At one turn Blake was 
dying, “He is rising, he is on the wing: sing, ye 
sons of morning; for the vapours of night are 
flown, and the dews of darkness are passed away.” 
At the next, “His complaint turned out to be the 
gall mixing with the blood.” At one turn his 
widow “was decayed by fretting and devoured 
with the silent worm of grief . . . withered only 
from holding fast to those dead branches which 
were her former life and shadow.” At the next, 
“Fiver since his death her stomach had proved 
restless and painful.” The garrulous keeper of 
the prints, ““Rainy-Day” Smith, one in the “line 
of London’s watchful lovers,” used to say to his 
visitors, “What I tell you is the fact, and sit down, 
and I?ll tell ye the whole story.” In a friend’s 

album he wrote: 7 


I can boast of seven events, some of which great 
men would be proud of: 

I received a kiss when a boy from the beautiful 
Mrs. Robinson; 

Was patted on the head by Dr. Johnson; 

Have frequently held Sir Joshua Reynolds’ 
spectacles; 

10 


eA Firm Persuasion That a Thing Is So 


Partook of a pint of porter with an elephant; 

Saved Lady Hamilton from falling when the 
melancholy news arrived of Lord Nelson’s 
death; 

Three times conversed with King George the 
Third, 

And was shut up in a room with Mr. Kean’s 
lion. 


An eighth event was his meeting with Blake at 
“conversaziones” of a Mrs. Mathew which, he ad- 
mitted, were “frequented by most of the literary 
and talented people of the day.” Almost as soon 
as Blake was dead, Smith sat down to tell the 
whole story of his life, and “what I tell you is 
the fact.” 

The testimony of Malkin, Tatham, and Smith, 
shows the curtain of existence going up before 
Blake in London in the years in which it was going 
up before Burns on his hillside. ‘Very early in 
life,” Blake began to look at pictures and to attend 
sales at Langford’s, Christie’s, and other auction 
rooms. His father bought for him the Gladiator, 
the Hercules, the Venus of Medici, “various 
heads, hands, and feet,” and supplied him with 
money to buy prints. He became known to the 
# 11 


William Blake in This World 


dealers and to the auctioneers: Langford called him 
his little connoisseur “and often knocked down to 
him a cheap lot, with friendly precipitation.” At 
ten he was “put to” Pars’s drawing school; at four- 
teen he apprenticed himself to the engraver Basire 
for seven years ; at twenty-one he began a course 
at the Royal Academy under Moser. From Pars 
to Basire to Moser was progress academic enough, 
but each step was taken with the vigour which, in 
Blake’s own phrase, he was in his youth famous 
for. As Erasmus said, “I have given up my whole 
soul to Greek learning, and as soon as I get any 
money I shall buy Greek books—and then I shall 
buy some clothes,” so Blake might have said, “I 
have given up my whole soul to art, and as soon 
as I get any money I shall buy pictures and 
paper to draw pictures on, and then I shall 
buy some clothes.” By the time he was “put to” 
Pars he had drawn nearly everything around him 
“with considerable ability.” At Pars’s he drew 
from plaster casts of the antique, and as soon as’ 
he had any money, he hurried out to the auction 
room to look for bargains in “Raphael, Michael 
Angelo . . . and the rest of the historic class.” 
Under Basire he spent his winters in the London 
churches, drawing Gothic effigies “in every point 
12 ** 


eA Firm Persuasion That a Thing Is So 


he could catch, frequently standing on the monu- 
ment and viewing the figures from the top.” He 
escaped pneumonia, and carried away from Basire 
“4 portfolio ...a great number of historical 
compositions, the fruits of his fancy, . . . which 
he had made in the holiday hours of his apprentice- 
ship.” At Moser’s he “drew with great care, per- 
haps all, or certainly nearly all the noble antique 
figures in various views,” and there he “continued 
making designs for his own amusement, whenever 
he could steal a moment from the routine of busi- 
ness.” 

Not in the art schools alone was the curtain of 
existence going up before Blake. There was, for 
instance, Catherine Boucher. Smith handed on 
an anecdote, which he received from a friend, 
who received it from Blake, concerning Blake and 
Catherine. “Our Artist fell in love with a lively 
little girl, who allowed him to say everything that 
was loving, but would not listen to his overtures on 
the score of matrimony. He was lamenting this in 
the house of a friend, when a generous-hearted 
lass declared that she pitied him from her heart. 
‘Do you pity me?’ asked Blake. ‘Yes, I do, 
most sincerely.—‘Then,’ said he, ‘I love you 
for that’—‘Well,’ said the honest girl, ‘and 

iS 


William Blake in This World 


I love you.2 The consequence was, they were 
married, and lived the happiest of lives.” 

Of their marriage and of their happiest of lives 
the eighteenth century left only an entry in the 
register of St. Mary’s Battersea: 


1782 
Banns of Marriage 


No. 281 William Blake of the Parish of 
Battersea Batchelor and Catherine Butcher 
of the same Parish Spinster were Married 
in this Church by License this Eighteenth 
Day of August in the year One Thousand 
Seven Hundred and Eighty two by me J. 
Gardner Vicar. This Marriage was 
solemnized between Us 

WILLIAM BLAKE 

The mark of X Catherine Butcher 
In the presence of 

Tuomas Moncer BuTCHER 

Jas. BLAKE 

Rost. Munpay Parish Clerk. 


On this theme the early nineteenth century 
spoke, in the person of Tatham: “Nimble with joy 
14 





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cA Firm Persuasion That a Thing Is So 


and warm with the glow of youth, this bride was 
presented to her noble bridegroom. The morning 
of their married life was bright as the noon of 
their devoted love, the noon as clear as the serene 
evening of their mutual equanimity. Although 
not handsome, he must have had a noble cowunte- 
nance, full of expression and animation; his hair 
was.of yellow brown, and curled with the utmost 
crispness and luxuriance; his locks, instead of fall- 
ing down, stood up like a curling flame, and looked 
at a distance like radiations, which with his fiery 
eye and expansive forehead, his dignified and 
cheerful physiognomy, must have made his appear- 
ance truly prepossessing.” 

The early twentieth century, in the person of 
Miss Amy Lowell, returned to the subject. 


William Blake and Catherine Bourchier were married 
in the newly rebuilt Church of Battersea where the 
windows were beautifully painted to imitate real 
stained glass, 

Pigments or crystal, what did it matter—when Jehovah 
sat on a cloud of curled fire over the doorway 
And angels with silver trumpets played Hosannas under 

the wooden groins of the peaked roof! 

William and Catherine Blake left the painted windows 
behind in the newly rebuilt Church of Battersea, 

ee 


William Blake in This World 


But God and the angels went out with them; 

And the angels played on their trumpets under the 
plaster ceiling of their lodging, 

Morning, and evening, and morning, forty-five round 
years. 


The rising curtain back in the eighteenth cen- 
tury revealed to Blake, along with the newly re- 
built church of Battersea, a drawing room of Rath- 
bone Place. Blake was getting acquainted; with J. 
Johnson, the publisher; with John Flaxman, with 
Henry Fuseli. With Flaxman he was a guest at 
Mrs. Mathew’s. In her parlour he appeared not 
as art student or as wooer and husband, but, to 
quote Gilchrist, as “erratic bard.” To Rathbone 
Place came Rainy-Day Smith, only eighteen years 
old, as yet unhonoured by saving Lady Hamilton 
from falling when the melancholy news arrived 
of Lord Nelson’s death. There he met Blake and 
often heard him “read and sing several of his 
poems.” Blake was, he reported, “listened to by 
the company with profound silence, and allowed 
by most of the visitors to possess original and ex- 
traordinary merit.” Later, when Blake’s visits at 
Mrs. Mathew’s were not so frequent, he continued 
to write, according to Smith, “many songs” and to 

16 


cA Firm Persuasion That a Thing Is So 


compose tunes to them. “These he would oc- 
casionally sing to his friends; and though, accord- 
ing to his confession, he was entirely unacquainted 
with the science of music, his ear was so good, that 
his tunes were sometimes most singularly beauti- 
ful, and were noted down by musical professors.” 

The tunes are gone, sunk deeper than ever plum- 
met sounded, but the poems which brought pro- 
found silence to Mrs. Mathew’s parlour were 
saved by Flaxman and by Mr. Mathew, who paid 
for their printing in a thin octavo of Poetical 
Sketches, dated 1783. In this unregarded volume 
Blake seems now an apparition out of the void, an 
early unofficial birth. Fifteen years before the 
eighteenth century died with prose accompaniment 
in the Lyrical Ballads, it died to music (a phrase 
of Arthur Symons) in Blake’s poem T 0 the Muses. 


Whether on Ida’s shady brow, 
Or in the chambers of the East, 
‘The chambers of the sun, that now 
From ancient melody have ceas’d; 


Whether in Heaven ye wander fair, 
Or the green corners of the earth, 
Or the blue regions of the air 
Where the melodious winds have birth; 


ye 


William Blake in This World 


Whether on crystal rocks ye rove, 
Beneath the bosom of the sea, 
Wand’ring in many a coral grove; 


Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry! 


How have you left the ancient love 
That bards of old enjoy’d in you! 

The languid strings do scarcely move! 
The sound is forc’d, the notes are few! 


Fifteen years before English verse was mustered 
back by Wordsworth and Coleridge to 


the ancient love, 
That bards of old enjoyd... , 


it returned spontaneously, without prose outriders, 
to that ancient love in Blake’s light-hearted songs, 


Ill drink of the clear stream 
And hear the linnet’s song; 
And there I'll lie and dream 
The day along: 


as it did in his lines to the evening star: 


Let thy west wind sleep on 
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, 
And wash the dusk with silver. 

18 


cA Firm Persuasion That a Thing Is So 


At his father’s; at Pars’s, Basire’s and Moser’s; 
in Mrs. Mathew’s parlour; everywhere except 
under the plaster ceiling where he lodged with 
Catherine, and perhaps there too, if Catherine had 
been willing to testify, Blake showed that he was 
a poet in his own sense of the word. Once he 
wrote, “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, 
make it so?”, and answered his own question, 
“All poets believe that it does.” 

.Tatham says that at home Blake “from a 
child . . . despised restraints and rules, so much 
that his father dared not send him to school.” 
At Pars’s, ten years old, he “met with... 
opposition and ridicule. . . . His choice was for 
the most part contemned by his youthful com- 
panions,” and his taste laughed at as mechanical. 
But choice and taste remained unchanged. When 
he came under Basire, Basire soon had to get 
him out of the shop because of his “frequent quar- 
rels with his fellow apprentices concerning mat- 
ters of intellectual argument.” He was sent to 
sketch in the Abbey, but there a Westminster 
School boy, “after having already tormented him 
. . . got upon some pinnacle on a level with his 
scaffold in order better to annoy him.” Blake 
brushed him off as he would a fly. Two en- 

19 


William Blake in This World 


gravers, Woollett and Strange, Blake knew “in- 
timately from their intimacy with Basire,” and he 
“knew them both to be heavy lumps of cunning 
and ignorance.” Woollett, he said, “did not 
know how to grind his graver. I know this. He 
has often proved his ignorance before me at 
Basire’s by laughing at Basire’s knife tools and ridi- 
culing the form of Basire’s graver, till Basire was 
quite dashed and out of conceit with what he him- 
self knew. But his ignorance had a contrary effect 
upon me.” 

Later, when Blake was working under Moser, 
he was looking over the prints from “Raffaelle” 
and Michael Angelo in the Library of the Royal 
Academy. ‘Moser came to me,” he wrote, “and 
said, ‘You should not study these old, hard, stiff 
and dry unfinished works of art: stay a little and 
I will show you what you should study.? He then 
went and took down Le Brun and Rubens’ Galler- 
ies. How did I secretly rage! I also spoke my 
mind! I said to Moser,—‘These things that you 
call finished are not even begun: how then can they 
be finished? The man who does not know the 
beginning cannot know the end of art!? ” 

To the parlour at Rathbone Place after a time 
Blake came less often, reported Rainy-Day Smith, 

20 


cA Firm Persuasion That a Thing Is So 


“in consequence of his unbending deportment, or 
what his adherents are pleased to call his manly 
firmness of opinion, which certainly was not at all 
times considered pleasing by every one.” Opin- 
ions he held with firmness are perhaps sug- 
gested by his satire, Am Island in the Moon, re- 
cently dug up from the obscurity in which he left 
it buried. In this medley of lyrics, farcical dia-_ 
logue, and jumbled names are characters whose 
“nasty hearts, poor devils, are eat up with envy. 
They envy my abilities.” A Mr. Huffcap may be 
Mr. Mathew, who at St. Martin’s in the Fields, 
says Gilchrist, “read the church service more beau- 
tifully than any other clergyman in London.” 
“Ah, Mr. Huffcap would kick the bottom of the 
pulpit out with passion,—would tear off the sleeve 
of his gown and set his wig on fire, and throw it at 
the people. He’d cry and stamp and kick and 
sweat, and all for the good of their souls.” In 
the company of Sir Isaac Newton, Scipio Africanus, 
Locke, and Voltaire, appears Mrs. Gimblet. The 
corners of Mrs. Gimblet’s mouth seem—“I don’t 
know how, but very odd, as if she hoped you had 
not an ill opinion of her—to be sure, we are all 
poor creatures!” 

According, then, to the most competent, ma- 

21 


William Blake in This World 


terial, and relevant testimony concerning his youth, 
Blake, a devoted student, a quick lover, something 
of a literary lion, had everywhere the poet’s firm 
persuasion that things were so. He stuck to a 
choice that was contemned, to a taste that was 
laughed at. The ridicule which made another 
quite dashed and out of conceit had upon him a 
contrary effect. At the recommendation of his in- 
structor he not only secretly raged, he also spoke 
his mind. Among the talented and literary people 
he soon came less often. Among them, as among 
the apprentices, he knew, he knew, he knew. 
Before this Blake, who had given his whole soul 
to art and who brooked no criticism, the curtain of 
existence was going up on the “death-birth” of 
a world not given to art, but given just then to 
whole-hearted criticism by torch and guillotine. 


22, 


IV 
The Divinity of Yes and No Too 


NGLISHMEN rejoiced at the fall of the 

Bastille and recanted after the Reign of 
Terror. Thus Cowper, who in 1785 had addressed 
the Bastille, saying, 


There’s not an English heart that would not leap 
To hear that ye were fallen at last, 


wrote during the Terror, “I will tell you what 
the French~have done. They have made me 
weep fora King of France, which I never thought 
to do, and they have made me sick of the name of 
liberty, which I never thought to be.” Coleridge, 
who, 


When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared 
had sung his “lofty gratulation,” 
Unawed . .. amid a slavish band, 


lived to ask forgiveness for his song, and to write, 
23 


William Blake in This World 


O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind, 
And patriot only in pernicious toils! 


Southey passed from dreams of a millennium, in 
Europe eventually and on the Susquehanna imme- 
diately, to the laureateship under George the 
Third. “What George? What Third??? sie 
King of England.” 


Europe has slaves—allies—kings—armies still, 
And Southey lives to sing them very ill. 


Wordsworth, who “till with open war Britain 
opposed the liberties of France,” felt that, 


Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very Heaven! 


viewing the later deeds, “the enormities,” of 
France, forgot that 


such a sound was ever heard 


As Liberty upon earth. 


The rejoicing and the recantation of Cowper, 
Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and others estab- 
lished itself as a type, a standard and most reason- 


24- 


The Divinity of Yes and No Too 


able English attitude towards the French Revolu- 
tion. 

Into a posture like theirs, not unacceptable to 
the Victorians walking softly on their crust of com- 
promise, Blake was thrust by Alexander Gilchrist 
in the Life of William Blake, published in 1863, 
reissued in 1880, 1907, and 1922, and always the ~ 
chief store-house of fact and anecdote concerning 
Blake. He was, said Gilchrist, “an ardent member 
of the New School, a vehement republican and 
sympathiser with the Revolution,” one who “may 
have even gone the length of despising the ‘Con- 
mown to him, “at this date. . . the 
French Revolution was the herald of the Millen- 
nium, of a new age of light and reason. He cour- 
ageously donned the famous symbol of liberty and 
equality—the bonnet rouge—in open day, and 
philosophically walked the streets with the same 
on his head. . . . Brave as a lion at heart was 
the meek spiritualist.””> But—now the second part 
of the formula—with the “September doings .. . 
and consequent defiance of kings and of human- 
ity” in Paris, all was changed. “Events taking a 
different turn from the anticipated one,” the re- 
maining books of his poem, The French Revolu- 
tion, “were never printed.” Blake himself “tore 

25 


William Blake in This World 


off his . . . cockade, and assuredly never wore 
the red cap again.” 

Gilchrist likewise, though he pictured Blake as 
in the habit of meeting at the time of the French 
Revolution in J. Johnson’s bookshop in St. Paul’s 
Churchyard, “a remarkable coterie,” William 
Godwin, Tom Paine, . . . “and others of very 
‘advanced’ political and religious opinions,” at 
once added sentences calculated to reassure Vic- 
torian readers. ‘Precise doctrinaire Godwin” 
Blake “got on ill with and liked worse”; to the 
“theological or anti-theological tenets” of Godwin, 
Paine, and the others, he was a “rebel”; the “pro- 
fanity of Paine,” he “rebuked.” 

This picture of Blake playing the prudent bour- 
geois—assuredly, oh, most assuredly, he never 
wore the red cap again! assuredly if he moved 
among the radicals it was to rebuke them—has 
been since 1863 usually accepted and even occa- 
sionally touched up. W. M. Rossetti, for instance, 
wrote in the seventies that Blake “would zealously 
and vigorously confute the freethinkers, such as 
Paine and Godwin,” and Edwin J. Ellis, 
in 1907, said that Blake “grew to look on Godwin 
as summing up all that is most dangerous and 
abominable,” and that “when the September mas- 

26 


The Divinity of Yes and No Too 


sacres in 1792 came with a shock of horror to all 
Europe, either Johnson or Blake, who then took 
off the red cap of Liberty with which he had 
alarmed his friends, burned the whole issue [ of 
Book One of The French Revolution]. If there 
had been any copies sold, they were burned in the 
same mood of horror.” Ellis believed in spon- 
taneous combustion. 

Blake burning his French Revolution behind 
. him isa surprisingly orthodox figure sequent to the 
stubborn Blake of pre-revolutionary days advanc- 
ing from the art schools upon the world, finding 
that the words of others had upon him a contrary 
effect. And, since it happens that he set down 
rather precisely what he thought about that revo- 
lutionary and self-criticizing world into which in 
his thirties he flung himself, a reliable index is at 
hand as to whether he so precipitately whipped 
off the red cap which expressed in England at that 
epoch a contrary effect. 

In a poem written to Flaxman descriptive of his 
“lot on earth,” Blake said: 


The American War began; all its dark horrors pass’d 
before my face 

Across the Atlantic to France; then the French Revo- 
lution commenc’d in thick clouds. 


at 


William Blake in This World 


“When France got free,” he wrote on the margin 
of Reynolds’s Discourses, 


When France got free, Europe, twixt fools and knaves, 
Were savage first to France, and after—slaves. 


“To what,” he asked in his annotations to Wat- 
son’s Apology for the Bible, “To what does the 
Bishop attribute the English crusade against 
France? Is it not the State Religion? Blush for 
shame.” ‘Since the French Revolution,” he wrote 
to George Cumberland in 1827, “Englishmen are 
all intermeasurable by one another: certainly a 
happy state of agreement, in which I for one do 
not agree. God keep you and me from the divin- 
ity of yes, and no too—the yea, nay, creeping Jesus 
—from supposing up and down to be the same 
thing ae 

Those whom Blake got on ill with and liked 
worse he was apt to impale at least in the privacy 
of his notebooks. Yet he, who wrote anathema 
and Antichrist across philosophers like Newton and 
Locke, he who was said by Ellis to have grown 
to look on Godwin as summing up all that is most 
dangerous and abominable, had nothing to say of 
Godwin. 

Furthermore, those by whom Godwin was zeal- 

28 


The Divinity of Yes and No Too 


ously and vigorously confuted were apt to be an- 
swered by him in kind. But as Blake denied God- 
win any comment, so by Godwin he was denied.* 
In fact, the only specific record of Blake’s men- 
tal attitude toward any member of the group 
named by Gilchrist has turned up recently in a 
document unknown to Gilchrist. This document 
is the copy of Bishop Watson’s Apology for the 
Bible, annotated by Blake in 1796, now in the 
Huntington Library. The book is the relic of a 
three-cornered argument, Tom Paine having had 
the first word in his “deistical writings,” Bishop 
Watson the second in his Apology, and Blake the 
third in his annotations. There are no rebuttals. 
Here is a chance to see whether Blake in his mind 
was a rebel to the theological tenets of Paine, a 
rebuker of Paine’s profanity. He certainly an- 
notated the Apology zealously and vigorously. 
“Folly & Impudence,” “Dishonest Misrepresenta- 
tion,” “Contemptible Falsehood & Detraction,” 
“Presumptuous Murderer,” “Serpentine Dissimu- 
1 Mr. Ford K. Brown, a student at Oxford who had made a 
lengthy search of the first-hand documents in preparation for 
a life of Godwin and had viewed the evidence from the angle 
of that purpose, wrote to me on August 16, 1921, of Godwin 
and Blake: “I haven’t been able to find any account of their 


acquaintance or even of either’s familiarity with the other’s 


work,” 
29 


William Blake in This World 


lation,” “Horrible,” “Illiberal,” “O Fool! Slight 
Hippocrite & Villain!”? he exclaimed in his mar- 
ginalia. 

But Bishop Watson, not Tom Paine, got these 
rebukes. ‘Watson,” Blake wrote, “has defended 
Antichrist.” “To me,” he said of Watson’s first 
letter, “it is all Daggers & Poison; the sting of 
the serpent is in every Sentence as well as the 
glittering Dissimulation.” “I have not,” he said, 
“the Charity for the Bishop that he pretends to 
have for Paine. I believe him to be a State trick- 
ster. . . . I should Expect that the man who wrote 
this sneaking sentence would be as good an inquisi- 
tor as any other Priest. . ..1 believe that the 
Bishop laught at the Bible in his slieve . . . Has 
not the Bishop given himself the lie in the moment 
the first words were out of his mouth? . . . Has 
he not spoil’d the hasty pudding?” 

Blake’s Christianity was not Paine’s. It was so 
exclusively his own that he may, as was reported to 
Gilchrist, have rebuked “the profanity” of Paine. 
But neither was his Christianity the Bishop’s. As 
he went over the argument between Paine and the 
Bishop, the theological distance between him and 
Paine was telescoped and that between him and 
the Bishop was elongated. Accordingly his verdict 

30 


The Divinity of Yes and No Too 


on the main issues of the argument fell unquali- 
fiedly in favour of Paine. Paine appeared to him 
“a better Christian than the Bishop.” “Well 
done, Paine!” he said to him. ‘Paine has not 
attacked Christianity. . . . Mr. Paine has not ex- 
tinguish’d, & cannot Extinguish, Moral rectitude; 
he has Extinguished Superstition, which took the 
Place of Moral Rectitude . . . the Holy Ghost 
. in Paine strives with Christendom as in Christ 
he strove with the Jews! . .. The trifles which 
the Bishop has combated in the following Let- 
ters are such as do nothing against Paine’s Argu- 
ments, none of which the Bishop dared to Con- 
sider. . . . If Paine trifles in some of his objec- 
tions it is folly to confute him so seriously in them 
& leave his more material ones unanswered .. . 
I have read this Book with attention & find that 
the Bishop has only hurt Paine’s heel while Paine 
~ has broken his head. . . . The Bishop has not 
answer’d one of Paine’s grand objections.” 

In the years of the French Revolution, including 
those of “the defiance of kings and of humanity,” 
Blake wrote a myth of revolution, embodied 
in A Song of Liberty, America, Europe, Book 
One of The French Revolution, and the Song of 
Los. The myth is at first glance obscure, tangled 

31 


William Blake in This World 


with symbolism, crowded with unheard of names 
—Theotormon, Oothoon, Bromion. But stripped 
of its symbolism, its parts placed in an order of 
thought not of time of composition, it is, as far as 
it touches politics, intelligible, consistent with 
itself. Its protagonist is Orc, called by his enemies 


Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, Hater of Dignities, 
Sower of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God’s law. 


When Orc, the “thought creating,” was born, 
The Dead heard the voice of the Child 


And began to awake from sleep, 
All things heard the voice of the Child, 
And began to awake to life. 


The Song of Liberty announces the theme of 
the myth, reveals “the new-born fire” on “the in- 
finite mountains of light.” 


Albion’s coast is sick, silent. ‘The American meadows 
faint! 

Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy 
countenance! O Jew, leave counting gold! return 
to thy oil and wine. O African! black African! 
Go, wingéd thought, widen his forehead! 


32 


The Divinity of Yes and No Too 


. . . the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the 
morning plumes her golden breast, 


Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the 
stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from 
the dens of night, crying: Empire is no more! and 
now the lion and wolf shall cease. 


For everything that lives is Holy! 
In America too: 


Albion is sick! America faints! .. 
And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o’er the Atlantic 
sea— 


The king of England “looking westward” trem- 
bles, and hears a voice which says: 


The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen 
leave their stations; 
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrappéd up; 


Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field, 
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the 
bright air; 
Let the enchainéd soul, shut up in darkness and in 
sighing, 
0 


William Blake in This World 


Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years, 

Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon 
doors are open; 

And let his wife and children return from the op- 
pressor’s scourge. 

They look behind at every step, and believe it is a dream, 

Singing: ‘““The Sun has left his blackness, and has found 
a fresher morning, 

And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless 
night; 

For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf 
shall cease.” 


For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life. 


In Europe: 


. the shadows are fill’d 
With spectres, and the windows wove over with curses 
of iron: 
Over the doors ““Thou shalt not” and over the chimneys 
“Fear” is written: 
With bands of iron round their necks fasten’d into the 
walls 
The citizens, in leaden gyves the inhabitants of sub- 
urbs 
Walk heavy; soft and bent are the bones of villagers. 
34 


The Divinity of Yes and No Too 


But for the Spirit of Liberty it is now “morning 
in the East” 


And in the vineyard of red France appear’d the light 
of his fury. 


There, in Book One of The French Revolution, 


. the Commons convene in the Hall of the Nation; 
like spirits of fire in the beautiful 
Porches of the Sun... . 


A debate ensues before the king. ‘The ancientest 
Peer,” Duke of Burgundy, rises to speak for the 
old order: 


Shall this marble-built heaven become a clay cottage, 
this earth an oak stool, and these mowers 

From the Atlantic mountains mow down all this great 
starry haivest of six thousand years? 


Till our purple and crimson is faded to russet, and the 
kingdoms of earth bound in sheaves, 

And the ancient forests of chivalry hewn, and the joys 
of the combat burnt for fuel... ? 


He is in the end answered by Orleans, “generous 
as mountains”: 


35 


William Blake in This World 


Fear not dreams, fear not visions, nor be you dismay’d 
with sorrows which flee at the morning! 

Can the fires of Nobility ever be quench’d, or the stars 
by a stormy night? 

Is the body diseas’d when the members are healthful? 


And can Nobles be bound when the people are free, or 
God weep when his children are happy? 


. . » go, merciless man, enter into the infinite labyrinth 
of another’s brain 

Ere thou measure the circle that he shall run. Go, thou 
cold recluse, into the fires 

Of another’s high flaming rich bosom, and return un- 
consum’d, and write laws. 

If thou canst not do this, doubt thy theories, learn to 
consider all men as thy equals, 

‘Achy brethren... o, 


Orleans prevails, and the Senate in peace sits “be- 
neath morning’s beam.” 


In the Song of Los, 


The Kings of Asia heard 
The howl rise up from Europe, 
And each ran out from his Web, 


36 


The Divinity of Yes and No Too 


From his ancient woven Den; 
For the darkness of Asia was startled 
At the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc. 


Thus in Blake’s myth of revolution, written 
from 1791 to 1795, a fierce spirit of liberty (men- 
tioned once in Parliament by Edmund Burke) ap- 
peared on the infinite mountains of light, freed the 
Americans, descended upon England, passed to 
Europe, flamed and conquered in France, and 
startled Asia. 

In Blake’s own words is the index as to whether 
in revolutionary days he rebuked the radicals and 
rejoiced and recanted according to the formula, 
whether in the same breath with Wordsworth and 
Coleridge and Southey he whipped off the red cap. 
That dawn in which Wordsworth found it bliss to 
be alive commenced for Blake, since it commenced 
with bloodshed, in thick clouds. The adulterous 
blind France of Coleridge seemed to him to have 
got free, and the pernicious toils he saw were not 
France’s, but those of the nations leagued against 
France. He, for one in his generation, saw the ice 
of compromise forming in England, and he for 
one would not be frozen in. He paid his compli- 
ments to the divinity of laureates, the divinity of 

37 


William Blake in This World 


yes, and no too,—and prayed God to save him 
from supposing up and down to be the same thing. 
In his myth of revolution he drew a hero, Orc the 
thought-creating, who was of the brood of 
Miulton’s Satan, with 


. courage never to submit or yield, 
And what is else, not to be overcome, 


of Shelley’s Prometheus: 


Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent, 
This like thy glory, Titan, is to be 

Good, great, and joyous, beautiful and free, 
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory. 


He himself, the creator of Orc, was not a lost 
leader, but rather was one of the company sung 
by Browning: 


Shakespeare was of us; Milton was for us, 
Burns, Shelley, were with us... . 


He, like Byron, held out “against the wind.” 


38 


V 
Dark Satanic Mills 


IFE is just one revolution after another. The 
French Revolution was not the only storm 
growling on the English horizon from 1790 to 
1800, from Blake’s thirty-third to his forty-third 
year. The slow agony of another death-birth of 
a world was unfolding; the travail of the indus- 
trial-mechanical revolution was in process. ‘Dark 
Satanic mills,” as Blake called them, were rising 
along the rivers; from deserted villages melan- 
choly bands were moving along the roads to the 
cities and to the ports of emigration. “AII the 
Arts of Life,” wrote Blake between 1800 and 
1803, 


. all the Arts of Life, they chang’d into the arts 
of Death in Albion. 
The hour-glass contemned, because its simple workman- 
ship 
Was like the workmanship of the ploughman, and the 
waterwheel 
That raises water into cisterns, broken and burn’d with 
fire, 


ay 


William Blake in This World 


Because its workmanship was like the workmanship of 
the shepherd; 

And in their stead intricate wheels invented, wheel with- 
out wheel, 

To perplex youth in their outgoings, and to bind up 
labours in Albion 

Of day and night the myriads of eternity, that they 
may grind 

And polish brass and iron hour after hour, laborious 
task; 

Kept ignorant of its use, that they might spend the days 
of wisdom 

In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of 
bread; 

In ignorance to view a small portion and think that 


CNR ia pega 


Blake saw that “a Machine is not a man nor a 
work of art.” “It is destructive of humanity and 
of art,” he said. He saw that commerce’s “insati- 
able maw must be fed by what all can do equally 
well.” He saw that “a warlike State never can 
produce Art.” “It will rob and plunder and ac- 
cumulate into one place, and translate and copy 
and buy and sell and criticize, but not make.” 


. . . Cruel works 
Of many Wheels I view; wheel without wheel, with 
cogs tyrannic, 
é 40 


Dark Satanic Mills 


Moving by compulsion each other; not as those in Eden, 
which 

Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony 
and peace. 


He shared the fate of men strayed from Eden 
and living under machinery and commerce and 
war. 


When winter rends the hungry family and the snow 
falls 

Upon the ways of men, hiding the paths of man and 
beast, 

Then mourns the wanderer; then he repents his wan- 
derings and eyes 

The distant forest; then the slave groans in the dungeon 
of stone, 

The captive in the mill of the stranger, sold for scanty 
hire. | 

They view their former life, they number moments 
over and over, 

Stringing them on their remembrance as on a thread of 
Sorrow. 

Thou art my sister and my daughter, thy shame is mine 
also; 

Can I see another’s woe 

And not be in sorrow too? 


41 


William Blake in This World 


Blake saw another’s woe; he saw poverty, hypoc- 
risy, oppression, militarism, ignorance, prostitu- 
tion, fear, cruelty,—London’s barriers to light- 
heartedness. At the sight the “merry notes” of 
the Poetical Sketches died on his lips. The Eng- 
land of those sketches, with “her merchants buzz- 
ing round like summer bees,” turned into 


Britannia’s Isle 
Round which the fiends of commerce smile 


Likewise 
. . . golden London 
And her silver Thames, throng’d with shining spires 
And corded ships, 


underwent a sea-change into the London of the 
Songs of Experience. There, Blake wrote, 


I wander thro’ each charter’d street, 

Near where the charter’d ‘Thames does flow, 
And mark in every face I meet 

Marks of weakness, marks of woe. 


In every cry of every Man, 

In every Infant’s cry of fear, 

In every voice, in every ban, 
‘The mind-forg’d manacles I hear. 


42 


Dark Satanic Mills 


How the chimney-sweeper’s cry 
Every black’ning church appals; 
And the hapless soldier’s sigh 
Runs in blood down palace walls. 


But most thro’ midnight streets I hear 

How the youthful harlot’s curse 

Blasts the new-born infant’s tear, 

And blights with plagues the marriage hearse. 


About 1793, changing Susquehanna to Ohio, he 
echoed the pantisocratic dream. 


Why should I care for the men of Thames, 
Or the cheating waves of charter’d streams; 
Or shrink at the little blasts of fear 
That the hireling blows into my ear? 


Tho’ born on the cheating banks of Thames, 
Tho’ his waters bathéd my infant limbs, 

The Ohio shall wash his stains from me: 

I was born a slave, but I go to be free! 


Holy Thursday, first a song in An Island in the 
Moon, then engraved in Songs of Innocence, was 
matched by another Holy Thursday in Songs of 
Experience. ‘The first ran: 

43 


( 


William Blake in This World 


*T was on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean, 

The children walking two and two, in red and blue 
and green, 

Grey-headed beadles walk’d before, with wands as white 
as snow, 

Till into the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames’ 


waters flow. 


O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of Lon- 
don town! 

Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own. 

The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of 
lambs, 


‘Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent 
hands. 


Now like a mighty wind they raise to Heaven the voice 
of song, 

Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven 
among. 

Beneath them sit the agéd men, wise guardians of the 
poor; 

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your 
door. 


The second ran: 


Is this a holy thing to see 
In a rich and fruitful land, 
44 


Dark Satanic Mills 


Babes reduc’d to misery, 
Fed with cold and usurous hand? 


Is that trembling cry a song? 
Can it be a song of joy? 
And so many children poor? 
It is a land of poverty! 


And their sun does never shine, 

And their fields are bleak and bare 
And their ways are fill’d with thorns: 
It is eternal winter there. 


In Songs of Innocence, in the mood of the first 
Holy Thursday, Blake had written: 


To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love 
All pray in their distress; 

And to these virtues of delight 
Return their thankfulness. 


For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love 
Is God, our Father dear, 

And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love 
Is man, His child and care. 


For Mercy has a human heart, 
Pity a human face, 

And Love, the human form divine, 
And Peace, the human dress. 


45 


William Blake in This World 


Then every man, of every clime, 
That prays in his distress, 
Prays to the human form divine, 


Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. 


Later Blake made a devil on the heath speak on 
the same abstractions: 


I heard a Devil curse 

Over the heath and the furze 
“Mercy could be no more 

If there was nobody poor, 


And Pity no more could be, 

If all were as happy as we.” 

At his curse the sun went down, 
And the heavens gave a frown. 


Down pour’d the heavy rain 
Over the new reap’d grain: 
And Misery’s increase 
Is Mercy, Pity, Peace. 


\ 


“Who commanded this?” Blake wrote, “What 
God? What Angel?” 
46 


Dark Satanic Mills 


To keep the gen’rous from experience till the ungen- 
erous 

Are unrestrain’d performers of the energies of nature; 

Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science 

That men get rich by; ...? 


The two versions of Mercy, Pity, Peace; the 
two Holy Thursdays; the two Londons; the Songs 
of Innocence and the Songs of Experience; the 
Marriage of Heaven and Hell; The Lamb and 
The Tiger show what opposite views govern 
Blake’s outlook on the English world of 1790- 
1800, on the horizons of which boomed the thun- 
der of industrial as of French revolution. Oppos- 
ing forces are the basis of his myth of revolu- 
tion, conflict between old oppression and privilege 
on one side and new thought and revolt on the 
other; they are the basis of the earliest prophetic 
books, Tel presenting youth and virginity and 
Tiriel, age and disillusionment. When ten years 
had passed, the same conflicts beat in his couplets 
called Auguries of Innocence: 


Joy and woe are woven fine, 
A clothing for the soul divine; 


One mite wrung from the labourer’s hands 
« Shall buy and sell the miser’s lands 
47 


William Blake in This World 


Or, if protected from on high, 
Does that whole nation sell and buy. 
The harlot’s cry from street to street 
Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet. 
The winner’s shout, the loser’s curse, 
Dance before dead England’s hearse. 
Every night and every morn 

Some to misery are born. 

Every morn and every night 

Some are born to sweet delight. 

Some are born to sweet delight, 

Some are born to endless night. 


In the stress of these years during which Words- 
worth, in his own words, lost all feeling of convic- 
tion, and, in fine, 


Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, 
Yielded up moral questions in despair, 


Blake maintained that “without contraries is no 
progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason 
and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to 
Human existence.” 

At this necessity he pulled no long face. “Fun 
I love,” he wrote in a letter in 1799. “Mirth 
is better than fun, and happiness is better than 

48 


Dark Satanic Mills 


mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this 
world.” ‘The best in the book,” he labelled 
Lavater’s aphorism: “Keep him at least three paces 
distant who hates bread, music, and the laugh of 
a child.” In this and other comments on the 
Aphorisms his friend Fuseli is reported to have 
said that any one could read Blake’s character. “I 
hate scarce smiles: I love laughing,” was one of 
the comments. Among the families “of high 
rank,” in which, according to Tatham, he was en- 
gaged to teach drawing, he was “found so enter- 
taining and pleasant, possessing . . . such jocose 
hilarity and amiable demeanour, that he frequently 
found himself asked to stay to dinner, and spend 
the evening: in the same interesting and lively 
manner in which he had consumed the morning.” 
““Exuberance is Beauty” he wrote. 

He was not a Duke Ferdinand, a Will o’ the 
Mill, a Tomlinson. He gave himself, as he said 
Paine did, to his “Energetick Genius.” “Energy,” 
he wrote, “is eternal delight.” ‘Sooner murder 
an infant in its cradle, than nurse unacted desires.” 
As if speaking to the priests, the priests who 


in black gowns were walking their rounds, 
And binding with briars my joys and desires, 
49 


William Blake in This World 
he asked: 


Are not the joys of morning sweeter 
Than the joys of night? 

And are the vigorous joys of youth 
Ashaméd of the light? 


Let age and sickness silent rob 

The vineyards in the night; 

But those who burn with vigorous youth 
Pluck fruits before the light. 


The curtain of existence was now fully up be- 
fore Blake. The revolutionary world, with its 
whole-souled self-criticism by torch and guillotine, 
was clear before his eyes. As he saw in politics and 
society, before Chesterton, the ice of compromise 
setting in, the English supposing up and down to 
be the same thing; he saw also, in industry, before 
Ruskin, machinery becoming a genius of enslave- 
ment as well as of release. Yet the tumbrils in the 
Paris streets, the dark Satanic mills along the Eng- 
lish streams, had not clouded his outlook, had not 
made him yield up moral questions in despair. 
Advanced so far into an existence often held to be 
organized for the disciplining of men’s hopes and 
the chastening of their desires, he showed neither 

50 


Dark Satanic Mills 


disciplining nor chastening, neither disillusion nor 
curbing. “More! more!” he had written in 1788, 
“4s the cry of a mistaken soul, less than all cannot 
satisfy man.” “I want, I want,” he wrote in 1793 
beneath a figure he drew with its foot upon the first 
rung of a ladder that reached to the moon. 


51 


VI 
Genius Cannot Be Bound 


HE ladder Blake meant to climb reached far 
away from the world of politics and the 
world of commerce. “Princes,” he wrote, “appear 
to me to be fools; Houses of Commons and Houses 
of Lords appear to me to be fools. They seem to 
be something else besides human life.” “I sup- 
pose an American,” he said, “would tell me that 
Washington did all that was done before he was 
born, as the French now adore Bonaparte and the 
English our poor George; so the Americans will 
consider Washington as their god. ... In the 
meantime I have the happiness of seeing the Di- 
vine countenance in such men as Cowper and 
Milton more distinctly than in any prince or hero.” 
“Go on! Go on!” he wrote to George Cumber- 
land, a young artist of Bristol. ‘Such works as 
yours Nature and Providence, the eternal parents, 
demand from their children. . . . How nature 
smiles on them; how Providence rewards them; 
how all your brethren say: ‘The sound of his harp 
52 


Gemus Cannot Be Bound 


and his flute heard from his secret forest cheers us 
to the labours of life, and we plough and reap, for- 
getting our labour.’ . . . Pray let me entreat you 
to persevere in your designing; it is the only source 
of pleasure. All your other pleasures depend 
upon it: it is the tree; your pleasures are the 
fruit. . . . Go on, if not for your own sake, yet 
for ours, who love and admire your works; but 
above all for the sake of the arts.” 

“The foundation of Empire” was to Blake “Art 
and Science.” ‘Remove them or degrade them,” 
he said, “and the empire is no more. Empire fol- 
lows Art, not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.” 
“Let us,” he wrote in his note book, “teach Bona- 
parte and whomsoever else it may concern that it 1s 
not Arts that follow and attend upon Empire, but 
Empire that attends and follows the Arts.” 


“Now Art has lost its mental charms 
France shall subdue the world in arms.” 
So spoke an Angel at my birth; 

Then said, ‘““Descend thou upon earth; 

Renew the Arts on Britain’s shore, 

And France shall fall down and adore. 

With works of art their armies meet 

And war shall sink beneath thy feet.” 
53 


William Blake in This World 


Marching to the tune, “With works of art their 
armies meet,” Blake marched as one fulfilling a 
duty. “You must leave Fathers and Mothers and 
Houses and Lands if they stand in the way of Art,” 
he said. He looked on the exhibition of his paint-. 
ings “as the greatest of Duties to my Country.” 
“The times require that every one should speak out 
boldly,” he wrote. “England expects that every 
man should do his duty in Arts as in Arms or in 
the Senate.” 

Marching to the tune, “With works of art their 
armies meet,” Blake marched as one who allowed 
himself no slackening of pace. “He wrote much 
and often,” Tatham reported. “Mrs. Blake has 
been heard to say that she never saw him, except 
when in conversation or reading, with his hands 
idle; he scarcely ever mused upon what he had 
done. Some men muse and call it thinking, but 
Blake was a hard worker; his thought was only 
for action.” He was “steadfastly attentive .. . 
to his beloved tasks,”? reported J. T. Smith, “and 
his application was often so incessant, that in the 
middle of the night, he would, after thinking 
deeply upon a particular subject, leap from his 
bed and write for two hours or more.” ‘He some- 
times thought,” said Tatham, “that if he wrote less 

54 


Genius Cannot Be Bound 


he must necessarily do more graving and painting, 
and he has debarred himself of his pen for a month 
or more; but upon comparison has found by no 
means so much work accomplished.” ‘Endless 
work is the true title of engraving,” he said him- 
self. “I curse and bless engraving alternately, be- 
cause it takes so much time and is so intractable, 
though capable of such beauty and perfection.” 
These are reports of the life of one driven by the 
northern demon, or god, who whispered in Car- 
lyle’s ear, “Produce! Produce!” 

Marching to the tune, “With works of art their 
armies meet,” Blake marched as one who did not 
expect to remain a private in the ranks. “War 
shall sink beneath z/y feet,” spoke an angel at his 
birth. In October, 1793, hi issued his prospectus 
To the Public. He bad invented, he announced, 
“4 method of Printing both Letterpress and En- 
graving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and 
grand, than any before discovered,” a method 
which obviated the difficulty that even Milton and 
Shakespeare had been under of not being able to 
publish their own works. 

“Mr. Blake’s powers of invention,” the pro- 
spectus said, “very early engaged the attention of 
many persons of eminence and fortune; by whose 

a5 } 


William Blake in This World 


means he has been regularly enabled to bring be- 
fore the Public works (he is not afraid to say) 
of equal magnitude and consequence with the pro- 
ductions of any age or country. . . .” Further- 
more, “numerous great works” were, in 1793, “in 
hand.” 

“Tf a method of Printing,” Blake stated, “which 
combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenom- 
enon worthy of public attention, provided that it 
exceeds in elegance all former methods, the 
Author is sure of his reward.” * 

Marching to the tune, “With works of art their 
armies meet,” Blake found himself beside others 
who heard snatches of the same music that was in 
his ears. For forty-five years he knew John Flax- 
man, the sculptor, and Henry Fuseli, the painter. 
In the vicissitudes and contrasts of his march be- 
side them was the answer of England to his great 
expectations. 

Flaxman was bound to succeed. When he told 


1 He was. | 

In 1911 a copy of his Milton, which combined the painter 
and the poet, sold for $9,000. In 1923 a copy of Milton sold 
for $17,000. In 1903 a copy of his I/lustrations to Job and in 
1918 a copy of his Illustrations to Dante, in which the painter 
shone, sold for £5,600 and £7,665 respectively. 

These sales of his works for “broad, round, golden guineas” 
are, as Miss Amy Lowell remarks, a “bouncing turn of for- 


tune.” 
56 











xman 


to starving 


iving 


One who preferred ] 





Genus Cannot Be Bound 


Reynolds that he was married, and Sir Joshua said, 
“Oh, then you are ruined for an artist,” his answer 
was to post off to Italy for seven years of study. 
“Tt was an invariable rule with him, abroad and at 
home, to shun, with the greatest care, the society of 
persons however brilliant and clever whose re- 
ligious and moral opinions were inimical to the 
laws of their God and their country.” He recom- 
mended a like prudence to the girl to whom he was 
engaged.” “You may remember Miss Tuckett 
told me in the Christmas Holidays she intended to 
have a Hop to which she invited us both—par- 
don me, I cannot accept that invitation, for dis- 
order and improper behaviour are the almost con- 
stant attendants on such meetings sometimes even 
in the politest companies . . . besides the indeli- 
cate manner in which Miss Tuckett treated the sub- 
ject of our Jove, together with other expressions 
were sufficient inducements to me not to desire to 
cultivate her friendship,—indeed my Nancy she 
must appear to great disadvantage when you con- 
trast her character with our Amiable friend Miss 
de la Cour whose intimacy I hope we shall be 
favoured with, and to whom we shall always en- 


1 Flaxman letters in Fairfax Murray Collection, Fitzwilliam 
Museum, Cambridge. 
57 


William Blake in This World 


deavour to make our house agreeable, I do and 
shall regard for the kindness I have experienced 
as well as for her refined sentiment.” There is 
no holding back one who prefers the de la Cours to 
the Tucketts. 

Behold, then, Flaxman Professor of Sculpture 
at the Royal Academy, and Fuseli, suddenly re- 
membering at a dinner that he was due at the 
first lecture of the new professorship, starting up 
and saying, “Farewell, friends—farewell, wine 
—farewell, wit—I must leave you all, and hear the 
first sermon preached by the Reverend John Flax- 
man!” Professorship, success, old age, did not 
mellow the sharp wine of this character. Henry 
Crabb Robinson, his friend, noted in the 1820s 
that Flaxman could not “forgive derision on such 
a subject” as Swedenborgianism, to which he had 
become “all but a proselyte”—still a reserve of 
prudence revealed in that “all but”!—and noted 
further that there was “frequently an earnestness 
that becomes uncomfortable to listen to when Flax- 
man talks with religious feeling.” 

Flaxman was summoned to the march with Blake 
when the Reverend Mr. Mathew went once to the 
shop of a plaster figure maker in New Street. 
Hearing a child cough behind the counter, he 

58 


Genius Cannot Be Bound 


looked over and spied “a little boy seated in a 
small chair before a large one upon which he had 
a book.” 

What book is that?’ ” 

“<Tt is a Latin one, sir,’ answered the child, rais- 
ing himself with the help of his crutches. ‘I am 
trying to learn Latin, sir ” 

This was a prophetic scene sowed in the biog- 
raphy of Flaxman’s childhood by his maturity of 
earnest effort. 

Mrs. Mathew at once invited him to her 
parlour in Rathbone Place. There, as she read 
him translations of the classic poets, he made 
sketches to illustrate the passages that struck his 
fancy, and there, in 1780, he first met Blake. 

Blake’s disappearance from Mrs. Mathew’s 
circle did not carry him out of Flaxman’s ken. 
From 1793 to 1800, according to Tatham, Flax- 
man used to come to see him at Hercules Build- 
ings “and sit drinking tea in the garden.” In 
1800, by an arrangement effected by Flaxman, 
Blake went down to Felpham, on the Sussex coast, 
to work under the auspices of William Hayley, 
Flaxman’s friend. At this time, it is conjectured, 
Blake gave Flaxman a set of drawings to illus- 
trate Gray’s poems, with these verses of gratitude: 

59 


William Blake in This World 


A little flower grew in a lonely vale, 

Its form was lovely but its colours pale. 

One standing in the porches of the sun 

When his meridian glories were begun, 

Leap’d from the steps of fire and on the grass 
Alighted where the little flower was; 

With hands divine he mov’d the gentle sod 

And took the flower up in its native Clod, 
Then planting it upon a mountain brow, 
“?'Tis your own fault if you don’t flourish now.” 


From Felpham Blake wrote back: 


I bless thee, O Father of Heaven and Earth, that ever 
I saw Flaxman’s face. 


“You, O dear Flaxman! are a sublime arch- 
angel,—my friend and companion from eternity. 
. . . L see our houses of eternity, which can never 
be separated, though our mortal vehicles should 
stand at the remotest corners of heaven from each 
other. 

“Farewell, my best friend! Remember me and 
my wife in love and friendship to our dear Mrs. 
Flaxman, whom we ardently desire to entertain be- 
neath our thatched roof of rusted gold,—And be- 
lieve me for ever to remain your grateful and 


Be BOna tS, WILLIAM BLakgs.” 


60 


Gemus Cannot Be Bound 


Returned to London, Blake wrote Hayley of 
“our good friend Flaxman’s good help,” of “Flax- 
man’s advice, which he gives with all the warmth 
of friendship both to you and to me,” and of Flax- 
man’s standing after the death of Banks, “without 
a competitor in sculpture.” 

I find little response in Flaxman to Blake’s 
demonstrative affection, or to his high esteem. 
The letter in which Blake called him his “friend 
and companion from eternity” Flaxman turned 
over to J. T. Smith, whom he knew “to be a col- 
lector of autographs.” Though he found some 
of Blake’s works “noble,” he gave slight answer to 
Blake’s leaping heart. Indeed I doubt if in the 
spirit of the man who had invariable rules as to 
whom he should shun there was any element to 
answer to the quick outpourings of uncalculating 
Blake. I doubt if it ever occurred to him that 
any one—even a Miss de la Cour—was his “friend 
and companion from eternity.” 

A grey thread, I think, runs in the scattered ex- 
pressions of Flaxman’s feeling for Blake. I catch 
a touch of coolness, of reserve, in his atti- 
tude; a sense of defects and limitations; of em- 
barrassed responsibility. He has Blake on his 
hands. As early as 1783 or 1784 he transmitted to 

61 


William Blake in This World 


Hayley “the writings of a Mr. Blake you have 
heard me mention—his education will plead sufi- 
cient excuse to your liberal mind for the defects of 
his work.” In 1800, a month before Blake wrote, 
“T bless thee, O Father of Heaven and Earth, 
that ever I saw Flaxman’s face,” Flaxman saw “no 
reason why he should not make as good a liveli- 
hood ... [at Felpham] as in London, if he en- 
graves and teaches drawing, by which he may gain 
considerably as also by making neat drawings of 
different kinds.” In 1805, Blake back in London, 
Flaxman wrote to Hayley: “You will be glad to 
hear that Blake has his hands full of work for a 
considerable time to come, and if he will only 
condescend to give that attention to his worldly 
concerns which every one does that prefers living 
to starving, he is now in a way to do well.” In 
1808 he wrote, “At present I have no intercourse 
with Mr. Blake.’ On May 12, 1826, the Flax- 
mans and Blake took tea and supper with Henry 
Crabb Robinson, by that time a common acquaint- 
ance. “The evening went off tolerably,” reported 
Robinson. “I doubt whether Flaxman sufficiently 
tolerates Blake. But Blake appreciates Flaxman 
as he ought.” This testimony to Flaxman’s in- 
tolerance of Blake and to Blake’s appreciation of 
62 





Courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum 


Blake by Flaxman 


If he will only condescend to give attention 
to his worldly concerns 





Genius Cannot Be Bound 


Flaxman was given, it should be remembered, by 
a man who looked on Blake as “wild, extravagant,” 
and on Flaxman as “one of the salt of the earth.” 


A bright foil to the uneasy mood of Flaxman’s 
acquaintance with Blake is the mood of Fuseli’s 
acquaintance with him. Fuseli was a Swiss with 
a give-and-take sense of humour and a racy tongue. 
He had a high forehead, a Jewish nose, sharp eyes 
under broad and bushy eyebrows, and _ hair 
blanched by fever. He creaked about in top-boots, 
powdered wig, and pigtail, leaving behind him at 
home, at Johnson’s table, at the Royal Academy, a 
splutter of quip and profanity. Seeing Mrs. 
Fuseli in a great rage, he said, “Harriet, my dear, 
why don’t you swear? It will ease your mind.” 
Seeing how easily a Doctor Geddes could be pro- 
voked, he caught him up at Johnson’s as Geddes 
said, “I wonder that you, Mr. Fuseli, who have 
so much ready wit, should be uttering dogmas by 
the hour together.” ‘You, Doctor,” he answered, 
“to find fault with dogmas—you, who are the son 
of a dog-ma.” Teased by an idle stupid student 
for an opinion of his drawing, he said, ‘It is bad; 
take it into the fields and shoot at it, that’s a good 
boy.” Charged with having cast a vote for Mrs. 

63 


William Blake in This World 


Lloyd and with thus having kept West’s election to 
the presidency of the Royal Academy from being 
unanimous, he said, “Well, suppose I did. She 
is eligible to the office—and is not one old woman 
as good as another?” Criticized because his work 
was unnatural, he said, “Damn nature! . . . she 
always puts me out.” Criticized because the boat 
in his picture of the Miracle of the Loaves and 
Fishes was not big enough, he said, “That’s part 
of the miracle.” 

He needed a sense of humour. There was Har- 
riet Fuseli, who did not know enough to swear; 
there was Mary Wollstonecraft—her affection for 
him may have reminded him of Pope’s Héloise to 
Abélard, which he called “hot ice”; there were 
students at the Royal Academy: “By God, you are 
a pack of damned wild beasts; and I am your 
blasted keeper.” There were critics, and there 
were twenty-five years as keeper and no pension 
at sixty-five. He gave his last course of lectures 
at the Academy when he was eighty-four. 

Blake was not one of his trials. He found him 
“damned good to steal from,” and, when Blake 
showed him a design, said, “Blake, I shall invent 
that myself.” ‘Every class of artists,” he wrote, 
introducing Blake’s illustrations to Blair’s Grave, 

64 


Gemus Cannot Be Bound 


“in every stage of their progress or attainments, 
from the students to the finished master . . . will 
find here materials of art and hints of improve- 
ment.” When Blake came into the antique school 
at the Royal Academy to make a drawing of the 
Laocoén Fuseli said, “What, you here, Meesther 
Blake? We ought to come and learn of you, not 
you of us.” 

Blake returned the compliments. Fuseli’s Satan 
Building the Bridge over Chaos he ranked “with 
the grandest efforts of imaginative art.” “O So- 
ciety for the Encouragement of Art!” he wrote, 
“King and Nobility of England, where have you 
hid Fuseli’s Milton?” England, he said, was two 
centuries behind the civilization which would en- 
able it to estimate Fuseli’s ZA gisthus. To the edi- 
tor of the Monthly Magazine Blake, his “indigna- 
tion . . . exceedingly moved” at a criticism of 
Fuseli’s picture of Count Ugolino, wrote a tirade 
in defence of “Poor Fuseli, sore from the lash of 
envious tongues.” ‘Such an artist as Fuseli is in- 
vulnerable, he needs not my defence: but I should 
be ashamed not to set my hand and shoulder, and 
whole strength, against those wretches who, under 
pretence of criticism, use the dagger and the poi- 
son.” 


65 


William Blake in This World 


Yet the friendship of Blake and Fuseli was not 
simply mutual admiration, a sweet comradeship of 
the neglected. There was vinegar in the oil of 
their compliments. Once Blake brought Fuseli 
a design. ‘Now some one has told you this is 
very fine.” “Yes,” said Blake, “the Virgin Mary 
appeared to me and told me it was very fine: what 
can you say to that?” “Say?” exclaimed Fuseli, 
“why nothing—only her ladyship has not an im- 
maculate taste.” Blake had a protective profanity 
of his own. -Flaxman once said to him, “How do 
you get on with Fuseli, Blake? I can’t get on with 
him at all. He swears so.” “Why, I swear at him 
again.” “Fuseli,”? wrote Blake in 1800, “is not 
naturally good natured, but he is artificially very 
ill natured.” 

“The only Man,” wrote Blake, in a bitter time, 


that e’er I knew 
Who did not make me almost spew 
Was Fuseli. 


“Fuseli,” said Tatham, summing up this acquaint- 
anceship, “was very intimate with Blake, and 
Blake was more fond of Fuseli than any other man 
on earth. Blake certainly loved him.” 

66 





Museum 


iam 


ill 


tzw 


i 


Courtesy of the F 


Fuseli by Flaxman 


He swears so 











Genus Cannot Be Bound 


If Flaxman marched beside Blake always with 
something of a sidelong glance at him, the glance 
of one conscious that he carries a marshal’s baton 
in his knapsack at a ragged conscript uplifted by 
the scenery along the road of march and careless 
of his superiors, Fuseli and Blake on the same long 
march kept comradely step. 

For Blake there were certain contrasts along the 
way. He saw Flaxman promoted in 1794 to the 
Royal Academy, and later made a professor there. 
He saw Fuseli become a member of the Academy, 
then a keeper, and finally a professor whose lec- 
tures were greeted with “loud and long claps of 
applause.” Blake’s historical studies, while he 
was in his twenties, had been thought by Romney 
to rank with those of Michael Angelo. A plan 
had been made to raise a subscription to send him 
to Rome to finish his studies. He had exhibited at 
the Royal Academy in 1780, 1784, and 1785. But 
after 1785 his exhibits at the Academy dwindled 
to a single picture in 1797 and another in 1808. 
In 1809 he wrote, “My designs . . . are regu- 
larly refused to be exhibited by the Royal 
Academy, and the British Institution has, this year, 
followed its example, and... effectually ex- 
cluded me. . . .”. Blake saw Flaxman and Fuseli 

67 


William Blake in This World 


cap their training in art by knowledge of the Con- 
tinent and its galleries. Flaxman had his seven 
years of study in Italy, and after the Peace of 
Amiens went to Paris “with multitudes of his coun- 
trymen to go wandering through the... 
Louvre.” Fuseli, who had come from the Con- 
tinent to England, trailing with him clouds of the 
Rousseau-Voltaire controversy, and who had re- 
turned in 1770 for eight years of study in Italy, 
went in 1802 to see “the well-filled galleries of 
Napoleon,” remaining long enough to collect ma- 
terials for a dissertation. Blake at the time of 
these visits wrote: “The reign of literature and the 
arts commences. Blessed are those who are found 
studious of literature and human and polite ac- 
complishments. Such have their lamps burning 
and such shall shine as the stars. . . . Now I hope 
to see the great works of art, as they are so near 
to Felpham: Paris being scarce farther off than 
London.” But in this modest hope, as in the case 
of the Italian journey, Blake was disappointed; 
it was his part to stay behind, to wish a good voyage 
to others. 

The author who had written himself down so 
blithely in 1793 as sure of his reward, found him- 
self six or seven years later living “by miracle, 

68 


Genius Cannot Be Bound | 


. . . laid by in a corner,” as if he did not exist. 
“But,” he said, “as I know that he who works and 
has his health cannot starve, I laugh at fortune, and 
goonand on. I think I foresee better things than 
I have ever seen. . . . It is now exactly twenty 
years since I was upon the ocean of business, and, 
though I laugh at fortune, I am persuaded that she 
alone is the governor of worldly riches, and when 
it is fit she will call upon me.” More years passed 
and still he felt that the fit time for fortune’s call 
upon him was near. Early in 1803 he wrote to 
his brother James: “The Profits arising from Pub- 
lications are immense & I now have it in my power 
to commence publication with many very formida- 
‘ble works, which I have finish’d and ready. A 
Book price half a guinea may be got out at the Ex- 
pense of Ten pounds & its almost certain profits 
are 500 G. . . . the certain profits of [ Hayley’s | 
Triumphs of Temper are a fortune such as would 
make me independent supposing that I would sub- 
stantiate such a one of my own & I mean to try 
many. ... In short I have Got everything so 
under my thumb that it is more profitable that 
things should be as they are than any other way— 
The Publishers are already indebted to My Wife 
Twenty Guineas for work delivered; this is a small 
69 


William Blake in This World 


specimen of how we goon. Then fear nothing & 
let my Sister fear nothing because it appears to me 
that I am now too old & have had too much ex- 
perience to be any longer imposed upon. ... I 
know that the Public are my friends & love my 
works & will embrace them whenever they see 
them. My only Difficulty is to produce fast 
enough.” 

But when he was a year older he still felt im- 
posed upon. “Money flies from me,” he wrote in 
1804. “Profit never ventures upon my Threshold, 
tho’? every other man’s doorstone is worn down 
into the very Earth by the footsteps of the fiends 
of commerce.” 

What a “fiend of commerce” could accomplish 
he was on the verge of learning. R. H. Cromek, 
“the predacious Yorkshireman,” was an exploiter 
of genius who “would have kept a conscience if 
he could have afforded it.” In 1805, according 
to J. T. Smith, he purchased Blake’s illustrations 
to Blair’s Grave “for the insignificant sum of one 
guinea each, with the promise, and indeed under 
the express agreement, that Blake should be em- 
ployed to engrave them.”. .. Instead of this 

1A letter written to Hayley by Blake on November 27, 1805, 


now in the possession of Miss Amy Lowell, decisively corrobo- 
rates Smith’s statement. 


Genius Cannot Be Bound 


negotiation being carried into effect, the drawings 

. Were put into the hands of Schiavonetti.” 
Blake, smarting from this double dealing, believ- 
ing already that Thomas Stothard, an early com- 
panion and a quiet retiring artist, was jealous of 
his work, was outraged to discover further that 
Cromek was purchasing from Stothard a Pilgrim- 
age to Canterbury, a subject for which Blake had 
exhibited to Cromek “designs sketched out for a 
fresco picture” as the work he intended “to execute 
Hext,? 

The sequel of the publication of his illustrations 
to Blair’s Grave further outraged him. In spite of 
the substitution of Schiavonetti’s for Blake’s 
graver, Blake was written large over the volume. 
A portrait of him by Thomas Phillips was the 
frontispiece; the illustrations were preceded by 
Fuseli’s flattering introduction and by a testi- 
monial to them as “a high and original effort of 
genius” from Flaxman, Stothard, and nine other 
Royal Academicians. They made the text by con- 
trast inconspicuous. But the only contemporary 
periodical notice, signed by R. H. (Richard Hunt) 
in the Examiner, said: “The work owes its best 
popularity to the faithful descriptions and manly 
poetry of Robert Blair, and to the unrivalled 

71 


William Blake in This World 


eraver of L. Schiavonetti.” His “tasteful hand,” 
had bestowed an “exterior charm” upon the “bad 
drawings,” “the deformity and nonsense” by 
which Blake had tried “to represent immaterial- 
ity.” In Blake’s drawings “an appearance of libid- 
inousness intrudes itself upon the holiness of our 
thoughts.” 

In 1809 Blake got up an exhibition of his 
pictures at 28 Broad Street, and in his Descriptive 
Catalogue of that exhibition sought to rout out “the 
nest of villains” in the Examiner. He charged his 
“competitors” with receiving fourteen hundred 
guineas, and more, from the profits of his designs 
for Blair’s Grave and with then leaving him to 
shift for himself. 

On the pages of the copy of Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds’s Discourses which at this period came into 
his hands, in the Descriptive Catalogue, and in his 
private note and sketch book, now called the 
Rossetti Manuscript, Blake poured out the poison 
of his scorn and the strong wine of his self-asser- 
tion. 

In the Canterbury Pilgrims Stothard, his 
“rival,” his “competitor,” had “done all by chance, 
or perhaps his fortune, money, money... . 
When men cannot read, they should not pretend 

72 


Genus Cannot Be Bound 


to paint. . . . Yeta little pains ought to be taken, 
even by the ignorant and weak. ... He has 
jumbled his dumb dollies together. . . . The 
scene of Mr. S—’s picture is by Dulwich Hills, 
which was not the way to Canterbury; but perhaps 
the Painter thought he would give them a ride 
round about, because they were a burlesque set of 
scarecrows ... I have beenscorned long enough 
by these fellows, who owe to me all that they 
have; it shall be so no longer.” 


I found them blind, I taught them how to see 
And now they know me not, nor yet themselves. - 


To these fellows he paid his compliments in epi- 
grams written only for his own eye in the Rossetti 
Manuscript. There Stothard and Cromek live, not 
like flies in amber, but like flies in gall. 


A petty sneaking knave I knew— 
O! Mr. Cr[omek], how do ye do? 


Cr[omek] loves artists as he loves his meat: 
He loves the Art; but ’tis the art to cheat. 


S[tothard], in childhood, on the nursery floor, 
Was extreme old and most extremely poor: 
He has grown old, and rich, and what he will; 
He is extreme old, and extreme poor still. 


73 


William Blake in This World 
Mr. Cromek to Mr. Stothard 


Fortune favours the brave, old proverbs say; 
But not with money; that is not the way. 
Turn back! turn back! you travel all in vain; 
Turn through the iron gate down Sneaking Lane. — 


To S[tothar |d 


‘You all your youth observ’d the golden rule, 
Till you’re at last become the golden fool. 


Of Reynolds he said on the margins of the Dis- 
courses: “This man was Hired to Depress Art. 
This is the opinion of Will. Blake. My proofs 
of this opinion are given in the following notes. 
. . . Contemptible Nonsense,—particularly inter- 
esting to Blockheads ... Can any man who 
thinks talk so? . . . Never Never . . . Damned 
fool . ... What a Devil of a‘Rule 7 Awe 
. . . He never was Abashed in his Life, and never 
felt his Ignorance . . . A mock. . . Is not this 
a Manifest Lie? . . . Supremely Insolent .. . 
False and self-contradictory. If this is True it is 
a devilish Foolish Thing to be an Artist... 
This is a Very Clever Sentence. Who wrote it God 
knows . . . The Mind that could have produced 

74 


Genius Cannot Be Bound 


this sentence must have been a Pitiful, a Pitiable 
Imbecility . . . I certainly thank God I am not 
like Reynolds . . . this President of Fools... 
It is evident that Reynolds wished none but fools 
to be in the arts, and in order to do this he calls all 
others vague enthusiasts and madmen . . . Genius 
cannot be Bound. It may be Rendered Indignant 
or Outrageous.” , 

But though Blake was rendered thus indignant 
and outrageous by his fate in an art world where 
he had spent the vigour of his “youth and genius 
under the oppression of Sir Joshua and his gang of 
cunning hired knaves, without employment, and, 
as much as could possibly be, without bread . . .”, 
in an England where “The Enquiry . . . is not 
whether a Man has Talents and Genius! But 
whether he is Passive . . . and a Virtuous Ass, 
and obedient to Noblemen’s Opinions in Art and 
Science,” still he could not be bound. 

In this sphere of art, as earlier in the sphere of 
revolutionary politics and of commercial upheaval, 
Blake did veritably stick by his guns. He did not 
bridle his sense of creative power. “This world of 
dross,” he said, “is beneath my notice.” He, 
“William Blake, a mental prince,” would hang the 
souls of his detractors “as guilty of mental high 

75 


William Blake in This World 


treason.” ‘Now he comes to his trial,” he said of 
himself. “He knows that what he does is not in- 
ferior to the grandest Antiques. Superior it can- 
not be, for human power cannot go beyond either 
what he does or what they have done; it is the gift 
of God.” He kept on resisting the discipline of 
circumstance, defying even with gaiety the 
chastening of material failure. 


—can I be angry... 
. with Flaxman, or Cromek, or Stothard, 
Or poor Schiavonetti, whom they to death bother’d? 


Flaxman and Stothard, smelling a sweet savour, 
Cry “Blakified drawing spoils painter and engraver;” 
While I, looking up to my umbrella, 

Resolv’d to be a very contrary fellow, 

Cry, looking quite from skumference to centre: 
“No one can finish so high as the original Inventor.” 


In a poem in the Rossetti Manuscript written 
under and partly around an entry dated August, 
1807, Blake argued out the whole matter with 
Mammon: 

I rose up at the dawn of day— 

“Get thee away! get thee away! 

Pray’st thou for riches? Away! away! 

This is the Throne of Mammon grey.” 
76 


Genius Cannot Be Bound 


Said I: ‘“This, sure, is very odd; 

I took it to be the Throne of God. 
For everything besides I have: 

It is only for riches that I can crave. 


I have mental joy, and mental health, 
And mental friends, and mental wealth; 
T’ve a wife I love, and that loves me; 


Pve all but riches bodily. 


I am in God’s presence night and day, 

And He never turns His face away; 

The accuser of sins by my side doth stand, 
And he holds my money-bag in his hand. 


For my worldly things God makes him pay, 
And he’d pay for more if to him I would pray; 
And so you may do the worst you can do; 

Be assur’d, Mr. Devil, I won’t pray to you. 


Then if for riches I must not pray, 
God knows, I little of prayers need say; 
So, as a church is known by its steeple, 
If I pray it must be for other people. 


He says, if I do not worship him for a God, 
I shall eat coarser food, and go worse shod; 
So, as I don’t value such things as these, 

You must do, Mr. Devil, just as God please.” 


(ai 


Vil 


Self-Portrait of the Undistracted 
Dancer 


HE devil went on doing as Rlake said he 
must and Blake went on refusing to pray to 
him. Catching the mood of his refusal, of his de- 
fiance of the despotism of fact, Arthur Symons in 
the last phrase of his fine study of Blake calls him 
“this joyous, untired, and undistracted dancer to 
the eternal rhythm,” and thus focuses the emphasis 
of striking diction and of terminal position on an 
interpretation of Blake’s life as spiritually untrou- 
bled, as elevated above the ups and downs of for- 
tune. 

Unpremeditated autobiography throws the 
sharpest light into the recesses, the dark corners of 
the mind. In Blake’s life the years from 1800 to 
1805 were by chance a period of such autobiog- 
raphy. His removal to Felpham in 1800 sepa- 
rated him from his acquaintances in London; his 
return to London in 1803 separated him from his 
acquaintances in Felpham. Under these circum- 
stances he poured himself out in letters which, 


78 


Self-Portrait of the Undistracted Dancer 


conserved by English thrift and resurrected by 
recent interest, penetrate some of the secret places 
of his heart. They are a spontaneous expression 
of his moods, the one full self-portrait of the 
artist whom Symons calls a joyous, untired, and 
undistracted dancer to the eternal rhythm. 

On July 2, 1800, Blake wrote that he began to 
“emerge from a deep pit of melancholy,— 
melancholy without any real reason,—a disease 
which God keep you from.” The emergence was 
complete by September 12. On that day he wrote 
to Flaxman, “It is to you I owe all my present 
happiness.” The happiness came in part from 
the plan of removal to Felpham and of life and 
work there near Flaxman’s friend, William Hay- 
ley. On September 16 he wrote Hayley concern- 
ing the project, “My wife is like a flame of many 
colours of precious jewels whenever she hears it 
named— My fingers emit sparks of fire with Ex- 
pectation of my future Labour.” The move itself 
kept Blake’s pulse high. On Thursday, September 
18, between six and seven in the morning, he and 
Mrs. Blake set out, past the “terrible desert” of 
London, and on “through a most beautiful coun- 
try on a most glorious day.” “Our journey was 
very pleasant; and though we had a great deal of 

79 


William Blake in This World 


luggage, no grumbling. All was cheerfulness and 
good humour on the road, and yet we could not 
arrive at our cottage before half-past eleven 
at night, owing to the necessary shifting of our 
luggage from one chaise to another; for we 
had seven different chaises, and as many dif- 
ferent drivers ... [and] sixteen heavy boxes 
and portfolios full of prints.’ The cottage be- 
neath its thatched roof of rusted gold Blake found 
“more beautiful than I thought it, and more con- 
venient.” “It is a perfect model for cottages,” he 
told Flaxman. ‘No other formed house can ever 
please me so well; nor shall I ever be persuaded, I 
believe, that it can be improved either in beauty or 
use. . . . Lhe villagers of Felpham are not mere 
rustics; they are polite and modest.) ine 
sweet air and the voices of winds, trees, and 
birds, and the odours of the happy ground, make 
it a dwelling for immortals. Work will go on 
here with God-speed. A roller and two harrows 
lie before my window. I meta plough on my first 
going out at my gate the first morning after my ar- 
rival, and the ploughboy said to the ploughman, 
‘Father, the gate is open.’ I have begun to work, 
and find that I can work with greater pleasure 
than ever.” 


80 


Self-Portrait of the Undistracted Dancer 


Blake was elate, that September. The gate was 
open; new life was beginning. Soon he sent an- 
other message to London: 


To my friend Butts I write 
My first vision of light, 
On the yellow sands sitting. 
‘The sun was emitting 

His glorious beams _ 

From heaven’s high streams. 
Over sea, over land, 

My eyes did expand 

Into regions of air, 

Away from all care; 

Into regions of fire, 
Remote from desire; 


I stood in the streams 

Of Heaven’s bright beams, 
And saw Felpham sweet 
Beneath my bright feet, 


I remained as a child; 
All I ever had known, 
Before me bright shone. 


Yet, though Felpham in those first weeks was 
sweet, a dwelling for immortals, where work would 
81 


William Blake in This World 


go on with God-speed, where all he had ever 
known shone bright before him, it was destined to 
pall upon Blake. “If I could have returned to 
London a month after my arrival here, I should 
have done so,” was a truth which came out in a 
later letter. Before January 10, 1802, the “pres- 
ent happiness” of 1800 had turned to “unhappi- 
ness,” and he had known at Felpham “the greatest 
of torments.” ‘When I came down here I was 
more sanguine than I am at present.” 

Still this letter of January 10, 1802, was written 
not in the midst of the greatest of torments, but 
in an hour of release. “I am now no longer in that 
state, and now go on again with my task, fearless, 
though my path is difficult. I have no fear of 
stumbling while I keep it.” 

He was “determined not to remain another 
winter here,” but to return to London. 


I hear a Voice you cannot hear, that says I must not stay, 
I see a Hand you cannot see, that beckons me away. 


Almost a year passed; that other winter was ap- 

proaching; Blake was still in Felpham. Mean- 

while he, who in January had had “no fear of 

stumbling,” had gone down once again into un- 

happiness and had—he used again the word he 
82 


Self-Portrait of the Undistracted Dancer 


had used of the “pit of melancholy”—once more 
“emerged.” “I have been very unhappy, and 
could not think of troubling you about it, or any of 
my real friends. (I have written many letters to 
you which I burned and did not send.) ... 
though I have been very unhappy, I am so no 
longer. I am again emerged into the light of 
day.” ) 

Spring came; the return to London drew nearer; 
the future grew brighter, the past darker. The 
three years at Felpham had been “sore travail”— 
O mortal comment on Felpham, the dwelling for 
immortals—but the future was bright. “I have a 
thousand and ten thousand things to say to you. 
My heart is full of futurity. I perceive that the 
sore travail which has been given me these three 
years leads to glory and honour. I rejoice and 
tremble: ‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made.? 
I had been reading the CXXXIX. Psalm a little 
before your letter arrived. I take your advice. I 
see the face of my Heavenly Father. He lays His 
hand upon my head, and gives a blessing to all my 
work. Why should I be troubled? Why should 
_my heart and flesh cry out? I will go on in the 
strength of the Lord . . . Excuse my, perhaps, 
too great enthusiasm!” 

83 


William Blake in This World 


The next year found Blake in London 
where, “Engravers, painters, statuaries, printers, 
poets, we are not in a field of battle, but in 
a city of assassinations ... The country is not 
only more beautiful on account of its expanded 
meadows, but also on account of its benevolent 
minds.” As Felpham receded into the past, the 
memory of the sore travail of his stay receded too. 
In October, 1804, he wrote: “I speak with perfect 
confidence and certainty of the fact which has 
passed upon me . . .. Thank God I was not alto- 
gether a beast . . . but I was a slave bound in 
_a mill among beasts and devils. These beasts and 
these devils are now, together with myself, become 
children of light and liberty, and my feet and my 
wife’s feet are free from fetters. O lovely Felp- 
ham, parent of immortal friendship, to thee I am 
eternally indebted for my three years’ rest from 
perturbation and the strength I now enjoy. Sud- 
denly, on the day after visiting the Truchsessian 
Gallery of pictures, I was again enlightened with 
the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has 
for exactly twenty years been closed from me as 
by a door and by window-shutters. Consequently 
I can, with confidence, promise you ocular dem- 
onstration of my altered state. ... Oh! the 

84. 


Self-Portrait of the Undistracted Dancer 


distress I have undergone, and my poor wife 
with me: incessantly labouring and incessantly 
spoiling what I had done well. Every one of 
my friends was astonished at my faults, and could 
not assign a reason; they knew my industry and 
abstinence from every pleasure for the sake of 
study, and yet—and yet—and yet there wanted 
the proofs of industry in my works. I thank God 
with entire confidence that it shall be so no 
longer. . . . Excuse my enthusiasm or rather 
madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual 
vision whenever I take a pencil or graver in my 
hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as 
I have not been for twenty dark, but very profit- 
able, years. I thank God that I courageously pur- 
sued my course through darkness. In a short 
time I shall make my assertion good that I am 
become suddenly as I was at first. . . . In short, 
I am now satisfied and proud of my work, which 
I have not been for the above long period.” 

The moods of these autobiographic letters 
from the elate journey to Felpham to the high 
hour after the visit to the Truchsessian Gallery, 
obey a rhythm the beat of which is alternating and 
extreme, swinging the dancer from pits of melan- 
choly to a dwelling for immortals, from present 

85 


William Blake in This World 


happiness in that dwelling to unhappiness, from 
that unhappiness to a path where he has no fear of 
stumbling, from that path to travel through perils 
and darkness, from darkness to victory—“I have 
conquered and shall go on conquering-—” from 
that victory to being a slave bound in a mill among 
beasts and devils, from that slavery to being a child 
of light and liberty, drunk with intellectual vision, 
feet free from fetters. This violent oscillation 
has a secondary rhythm, known to man, by which 
the near becomes sore travail, and the far a land 
unannoyed, and that far land reached becomes 
travail again, and what once was near and now is 
past and far becomes a rest from perturbation. 

As the paleontologist reconstructs the body of 
the ichthyosaur from fragments of bone and par- 
tial imprints in the rock, as Joseph Bédier de- 
veloped a complete Tristan and Iseult in the an- 
tique manner from one brief antique episode, so 
the student of Blake’s moods might construct 
from the fragmentary record of the years after 
1800 a theory of the pulse of Blake’s whole men- 
tal life; might suspect that Blake was swung 
his life long up and down to the rhythm of the 
alternation from elation to depression to elation, 
which governed those years. The suspicion 

86 


Self-Portrait of the Undistracted Dancer 


would, in general, be supported by the reflection 
that in external circumstances those years were as 
tranquil as any that had come before and far 
more tranquil than the years that were to follow 
and to render Blake indignant and outrageous. 
The suspicion would be supported by Flaxman’s 
opinion “that the association and arrangement of 
his ideas do not seem likely to be soothed or more 
advantageously disposed by any power inferior to 
that by which man is originally endowed with his 
faculties,” an opinion expressed after Flaxman had 
known Blake for twenty-four years. The sus- 
picion would find specific support in a phrase in a 
letter written one year before Blake found him- 
self in that pit of melancholy from which he 
emerged just before going down to Felpham. 
“T feel happy and contented,” he wrote to Cum- 
berland on August 26,1799. “Having passed now 
nearly twenty years in ups and downs, I am used to 
them.” It would find further specific support in a 
jotting on the margin of the Rossetti Manuscript. 
“Tuesday Jany. 20, 1807, between Two & seven 
in the Evening, Despair.” His despair from two 
to seven in an evening of January, 1807, exposes 
the fallacy of seizing, as is sometimes done, 
the moment of illumination two years before, in 
87 


William Blake in This World 


December, 1804, after the visit to the Truchsessian 
Gallery, as a permanent change in Blake’s life, a 
second birth, followed, it is said, by years of “‘in- 
vulnerable serenity.” His perfect confidence and 
certainty of the fact which had passed upon him at 
that time, his entire confidence, drop into place as 
marking one pulsation of his moods, a systole, to 
be followed by a diastole. Despair in 1807 was 
the diastole, and it and the memory of the vicissi- 
tudes of Blake’s march as an artist among artists, 
open a vista beyond 1804, as twenty years of ups 
and downs open a vista before 1800, of a man 
dancing to a rhythm which was for him, as far as 
this world went, unescapable, eternal. ‘William 
Blake,” he wrote in William Upcott’s autograph 
album on January 16, 1826: “Born 28th Novr. 
1757 in London and has died several times since.” 
It was a rhythm that does not always keep those 
who dance to it among the joyous, the untired, and 
the undistracted. 


88 


VIll 
The Neurotic and the Stupid 


LAKE, in other words, was neurotic. He fell 
into “melancholy,—melancholy without any 
real reason”; he oscillated violently from moods 
of deepest depression to moods of highest exalta- 
tion; hours of perfect and entire confidence and 
certainty were followed by hours of despair; he 
burned instead of sending many letters; in a short 
time he would make good his assertion of new 
power, and yet—and yet—and yet there had 
wanted proofs; he laboured under extreme ex- 
citement—“My heart is full of futurity, I rejoice 
and tremble”—“Excuse my enthusiasm or rather 
madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual 
vision.” During periods in the “pit of melan- 
choly” he shut himself up—“TI have been too little 
among friends, which I fear they will not excuse, 
and I know not how to apologise for.” 

He had the neurotic’s need for dependence on 
some one outside himself. He “could not subsist 
on the Earth,” but by his “conjunction with Flax- 
man, who knows to forgive nervous fear.” 

89 


William Blake in This World 


When Flaxman was taken to Italy, Fuseli was 
given to me for a season, 

And now Flaxman hath given me Hayley, his 
friend, to be mine. .. . 


“You,” he wrote to Hayley, “conducted me 
through three years that would have been the 
darkest years that ever mortal suffered... I 
know that if I had not been with you I must have 
perished.” 

He had the neurotic’s sense of time. Like An- 
drew Marvell he could say: 


. at my back I always hear, 
Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near. 


“Every moment lost is a moment that cannot be 
redeemed.” “Temptations are on the right hand 
and on the left. Behind, the sea of time and space 
roars and follows swiftly. He who keeps not right 
onwards is lost; and if our footsteps slide in clay, 
how can we do otherwise than fear and tremble?” 

“There are two races of people,” according to 
Mr. Sinclair Lewis, “only two, and they live side 
by side.” They will never understand each other 
and it is madness for them to debate. They call 
each other the neurotic and the stupid. 

90 


The Neurotic and the Stupid 


If William Blake was neurotic, William Hayley 
was stupid. He was the lineal ancestor of the old 
lady in the plush chair at the Park Avenue Hotel 
who reaches out a qivering hand for the newspaper 
and says, “I thought I’d just like to look over 
the death notices.” It was Hayley’s work, said 
Byron, “to damn the dead with purgatorial praise.” 

Follow his correspondence with Flaxman for a 
short period.’ “I was enabled to compose on a 
sudden, the other morning at the dawn of day, 
what I had wish’d to do in vain for some years 
. . . [mean an Epitaph, that may, I think, be un- 
exceptionable, on that wonderful Being, my poor 
Eliza!” Again he sent to the same “sublime 
sculptor,” marked “Most private, “A recent epi- 
taph new-born .. . and designed to be plac’d 
with a work of the sublime sculptor in the Abbey 
or in St. Paul’s.” The sculptor answered perhaps 
in his own role of one who preferred living to 
starving, for Hayley’s next letter ran: “Let me 
now thank my dear warm-hearted Friend for his 
animated Expressions concerning a monument in 
the Abbey. No! my excellent Monitor, I did not 
mean to be so improperly lavish, as to defray the 


1 Hayley letters in the Fairfax Murray Collection, Fitzwilliam 
Museum, Cambridge. 
a1 


William Blake in This World 


expense of that monument.” Later he wrote: “I 
was delighted by your kind praise of my various 
Epitaphs—the best return I can make to praise so 
dearly welcome is to transcribe for you a new 
Epitaph that I have just compos’d: 


Hicks, the kind usher to the social Room, 
Here points, to all, the all-awaiting ‘Tomb. 


Keep the epitaphs in perfect privacy,” he urged. 
“T am making a little collection of Epitaphs in 
manuscript,” he wrote, “and am astonished to find 
them so numerous. I shall close the list with my 
own, which I composed some years ago.” 

This writer of epitaphs, let us reflect with awe, 
was once offered the laureateship. Of him Byron 
further wrote: 


His style in youth or age is still the same 

Forever feeble and forever tame. 

Triumphant first see ““Temper’s Triumphs” shine! 
At least Pm sure they triumphed over mine. 

Of “Music’s Triumphs” all who read may swear 
That luckless Music never triumphed there. 


Southey said everything about Hayley was good 
except his poetry. Here I am sure that Southey 
used “good” in its worst sense. There is an irre- 


92 





fetey 


ast 


mcd 





UHL 


aa: 


i 
iif 




















it 


d herm 


icte 


death 


ionate an 


affect 


- 


The Neurotic and the Stupid 


mediable flat sentimentality about this endowed 
weeper, an incurable commonplaceness about this 
“ever affectionate and afflicted Hermit” of Felp- 
ham, moping and patronizing in his “Turrett,” 
holding an umbrella over himself and his horse 
as he rode about the countryside, entertaining 
Romney in “Demogorgon’s Hall,” bringing down 
to the breakfast-table each morning and presenting 
to his guests with solemn bow “an epitaph new- 
born.” Make all allowance for other times and 
other manners, yet you cannot believe that fresh 
breezes stirred his mind, that stout joys and sor- 
rows stirred his heart. He meant well, but he was 
pretentious and stupid. 

With this stupid patron the neurotic Blake was 
shut up for three “darkest” years. The two were 
“The Hermit and the Artist of Felpham.” At the 
Hermit’s side stood always “The good Blake,” 
“our good enthusiastic friend Blake,” “our worthy 
friend Blake,” “the zealous indefatigable Blake,” 
“the kind industrious Blake,” “our good, warm- 
hearted artist.” For Hayley’s library Blake drew 
a frieze of the heads of the poets. By Hayley he, 
whose business it was to create, was taught to paint 
miniatures, to make “a very creditable copy” of a 
portrait of a “dear departed bard,” to make “neat 

93 


William Blake in This World 


drawings of different kinds.” “I am become a 
likeness-taker,” Blake wrote. For those Triumphs 
of Temper which triumphed over Byron he en- 
graved small plates from drawings by Maria Flax- 
man—“and it seems that other things will follow 
in course if I do but copy these well.” For a series 
of Ballads by Hayley he made prints, a series 
reviewed by Southey with a quotation from 
O’Keefe’s song, “Hayley-gaily gamborarly.” For 
the Life of Cowper, “a work of magnitude which 
Mr. Hayley is now labouring at,” Blake engraved 
plates. “My dependence is on engraving at pres- 
ent, and particularly on the engravings I have in 
hand for Mr. H.; and I find on all hands great 
objections to my doing anything but the mere 
drudgery of business, and intimations that if I 
do not confine myself to this I shall not live.” To 
Hayley’s epitaphs he had to listen—“If this” (the 
unexceptionable one to Eliza), wrote Hayley to 
Flaxman, “should happen to strike you as it does 
Blake and me!” He had to be struck by them. 

In these Felpham years, over which Hayley is 
written so large and so small, Blake, having ex- 
pected new freedom to create, and having found 
a smothering pressure to imitate, exploded against 
the pressure. 

94 


The Neurotic and the Stupid 


At the beginning his elation at the move to Felp- 
ham radiated round Hayley. “Mr. Hayley re- 
ceived us with his usual brotherly affection,” he 
reported to friendsin London. “Mr. Hayley acts 
like a prince. I am at complete ease.” But the 
serpent soon entered Eden. Blake remembered 


. . the verses that Hayley sung, 
When my heart knock’d against the root of my tongue. 


He wrote a long letter to his brother James, the 
letter full of reassurance and of family frankness, 
acquainting James with “a determination which we 
have lately made, namely To leave this Place be- 
cause I am now certain of what I have long doubted 
Viz that H. is jealous as Stothard was & will be 
no further My friend than he is compelld by cir- 
cumstances. The truth is As a Poet he is fright- 
ened at me & as a Painter his views & mine are 
opposite; he thinks to turn me into a Portrait 
Painter as he did Poor Romney, but this he nor 
all the devils in hell will never do. I must own 
that seeing H. like S. envious (& that he is I am 
now certain) made me very uneasy, but it is over 
& I now defy the worst & fear not while I am true 
to myself which I will be . . . burn this letter 
95 


William Blake in This World 


because it speaks so plain. . . . I read your letter 
to Mr. H. & . . . he is very afraid of losing me 
& also very afraid that my Friends in London 
should have a bad opinion of the reception he has 
given to me.” ; 

By the summer of 1803 the explosion had come. 
Blake hoped ‘“‘to speak to future generations by a 
sublime allegory which is now perfectly completed 
into a grand poem.” “But,” he wrote, “of this 
work I take care to say little to Mr. Hayley, since 
hé)1s).. 7. averse to. my poetry: 

“As to Mr. H., I feel myself at liberty to say 
as follows upon this ticklish subject; I regard 
fashion in poetry as little as I do in painting .. . 
But Mr. H. approves of my designs as little as he 
does of my poems, and I have been forced to insist 
on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; 
for I am determined to be no longer pestered with 
his genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation. I 
know myself both poet and painter, and it is not his 
affected contempt that can move to anything but a 
more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by 
my late firmness I have brought down his affected 
loftiness, and he begins to think I have some 
genius: as if genius and assurance were the same 
thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me 

96 


The Neurotic and the Stupid 


only deserve laughter ... my antagonist is 
silenced completely, and I have compelled what 
should have been of freedom—my just right as 
an artist and as a man.” 

The tone of this letter identifies the writer as 
the man who long before at Moser’s, knew, 
knew, knew; who at Mrs. Mathew’s showed what 
his adherents were pleased to call a manly firmness 
of opinion; who in the revolutionary decade did 
not accept the formula of the recanting poets. 
Here, as earlier, he went his own way, brooking no 
criticism, hearing his own drummer. He did not 
at Felpham “wish to irritate by seeming too ob- 
stinate in poetic pursuits. But if all the world 
should set their faces against this, I have orders 
to set my face like a flint . . . against their faces, 
and my forehead against their foreheads.” “And 
if any attempt should be made to refuse me... . 
I am inflexible.” “I know that as far as Designing 
& Poetry are concerned, I am envied in many 
Quarters, but I will cram the dogs.” “Nothing 
can withstand the fury of my course. .. .” 

But soon after the explosion Blake was involved 
in a “perilous adventure,” and his wife was “much 
terrified.” He was “in a bustle” to defend him- 
self against “a very unwarrantable warrant” from 

97 


William Blake in This World 


a justice of the peace in Chichester. In this ex- 
tremity Hayley, “the antagonist,” came forward 
with £50 bail. Blake’s mood changed; the pres- 
sure of his bitterness towards Hayley subsided; he 
turned ruefully on himself. “This perhaps was 
suffered to clear up some doubts, and to give 
opportunity to those whom I doubted to clear 
themselves of all imputation. If a man offends 
me ignorantly, and not designedly, surely I ought 
to consider him with favour and affection... . 
Burn what I have peevishly written about my 
friend. I have been very much degraded and 
injuriously treated; but if all arise from my own 
fault, I ought to blame myself.” 


O! why was I born with a different face? 

Why was I not born like the rest of my race? 
When I look, each one starts; when I speak, I offend; 
Then I’m silent and passive, and lose every friend. 


Then my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise, 
My person degrade, and my temper chastise; 
And the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; 
All my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. 


I am either too low, or too highly priz’d; 
When elate I’m envied; when meek I’m despis’d. 


98 


The Neurotic and the Stupid 


In a play called Overtones are four char- 
acters, two carrying on a conventional dialoge, and 
two others, standing over them, interpolating their 
actual thoughts, the overtones of the dialogue. 
Blake after his return to London carried on, for his 
part, such a dialogue with Hayley, writing the con- 
ventional words in his letters to Hayley at Felp- 
ham, writing the overtones on the pages of the 
Rossetti Manuscript. ‘The screen of privacy was 
set. Over it in his letters Blake spoke as he should. 
Behind it in his note book he grimaced. 


BLAKE To HayLeEy 


In the “Rossetti 
Manuscript” 


In the Letters to Felpham 


My wife joins me in re- To forgive enemies H— 


spects and love to you, does pretend, 


My wife joins me in love 
to you, 


God be with you in all 
things. 

My wife joins me in this 
prayer. 


Who never in his lifé 
forgave a friend, 

And when he could not 
act upon my wife 

Hired a villain to bereave 
my life. 


99 


William Blake in This World 


Pray accept my and my 
wife’s sincerest love and 
gratitude. 


Pray, my dear sir, favour 

me with a line concern- 
ing your health; ... 
your innocent humble 
servant, whose heart and 
soul are more and more 
drawn out towards you, 
Felpham, and its kind 
inhabitants. 
. . God bless you all, 
O people of Sussex, 
around your hermit and 
bard. 

Such sweet verses as yours 
in your last beautiful 
poem must... afford 
you their full reward. 

Truly proud I am to be 
in possession of this 
beautiful little estate 


Of H—’s birth this was 
the happy lot, 

His mother on his father 
him begot. 


When H— finds out what 
you cannot do, 

That is the very thing 
he'll set you to; 


Thy friendship oft has 
made my heart to ache: 

Do be my enemy—for 
friendship’s sake. 


100 


The Neurotic and the Stupid 


[from] the grand bulk 


of your literary prop- 
erty. On H— the Pickthank. 


I also thank you for your 
very beautiful little I write the rascal thanks, 


poem on the king’s re- till he and I 

covery; it is one of With thanks and compli- 
the prettiest I ever ments are quite drawn 
Semte c tc) dry. 


e e e 


You can have no idea 
. -- how much your 
name is loved and re- 
spected. 


Let him who has never heard an overtone in 
his own heart cast the first stone. 


101 


IX 


A Bosom Secure from Tumultuous 
Passions 


HAT very unwarrantable warrant from a 

justice of the peace in Chichester, against 
which Blake had to defend himself at the end of 
his stay at Felpham, was sworn to by a trooper of 
the Royal Dragoons, named Scofield. He had 
without Blake’s knowledge been invited into the 
cottage garden as an assistant to a gardener em- 
ployed there. Blake wrote to London “the whole 
outline” of the event. 

“T desired him, as politely as possible, to go out 
of the garden; he made me an impertinent answer. 
I insisted on his leaving the garden; he refused. 
I still persisted in desiring his departure. He 
then threatened to knock out my eyes, with many 
abominable imprecations, and with some contempt 
for my person; it affronted my foolish pride. I 
therefore took him by the elbows, and pushed him 
before me till I had got him out. There I in- 
tended to have left him, but he, turning about, 

102 


cA Bosom Secure from Tumultuous Passions 


put himself into a posture of defiance, threaten- 
ing and swearing at me. I, perhaps foolishly and 
perhaps not, stepped out at the gate, and, putting 
aside his blows, took him again by the elbows, and, 
keeping his back to me, pushed him forward down 
- the road about fifty yards—he all the while en- 
deavouring to turn around and strike me, and 
raging and cursing, which drew out several neigh- 
bours. At length, when I had got him where he 
was quartered, which was very quickly done, we 
Were met at the gate by the master of the house, 
the Fox Inn (who is the proprietor of my cottage), 
and his wife and daughter, and the man’s comrade, 
and several other people. My landlord compelled 
the soldiers to go indoors, after many abusive 
threats against me and my wife from the two 
soldiers; but not one word of threat on account of 
sedition was uttered at that time. This method of 
revenge was planned between them after they had 
got together into the stable.” 

The method of revenge embodied itself in the 
indictment in the case of “Rex vs. Blake.” In 
this document it was charged that the said William 
Blake “then and there did make an assault on him 
the said John Scholfield then and there did beat 
and wound and ill treat so that his life was greatly 

103 


William Blake in This World 


despaired of.” Furthermore it was charged that 
William Blake “being a Wicked and Seditious and 
Evil-disposed person and greatly disaffected to our 
said Lord the King and Wickedly and Seditiously 
intending to bring our said Lord the King into 
great Hatred contempt & scandal with all his liege 
and faithful Subjects of this Realm and the 
Soldiers of our said Lord the King to Scandalize 
and Vilify and intending to withdraw the fidelity 
and allegiance of his said Majesty’s Subjects from 
his said Majesty and to encourage and invite as far 
as in him lay the Enemies of our said Lord the 
King to Invade this Realm and Unlawfully and 
Wickedly to seduce and encourage his Majesty’s 
Subjects to resist & oppose our said Lord the King 
on the said 12th day of Aug in yr. of Our Lord 
One thousand eight hundred and three with force 
& arms at the Parish aforesaid in the county afore- 
said in the presence and hearing of divers liege 
Subjects of our Lord the King with whom the said 
William Blake was then and there conversing of 
and concerning our said Lord the King and his 
Soldiers & of and concerning an Invasion of this 
Realm by the Enemies of our said Lord the King 
maliciously unlawfully wickedly and seditiously 
did pronounce utter and declare the English words 
104 


eA Bosom Secure from Tumultuous Passions 


following ‘The English (meaning the Subjects of 
our said Lord the King residing in this Realm) 
know within themselves that Buonaparte (meaning 
the Chief Consul of the French Republic & one 
of the persons exercising the powers of govern- 
ment in France) would take possession of England 
in an hour’s time and then it would be put to every 
Englishman’s choice for to either fight for the 
French or to have his Throat cut I (meaning him- 
self the said Wm Blake) think that I (meaning 
himself the said Wm Blake) am as strong a man 
as most and it shall be throat cut for throat cut and 
the strongest man will be the conqueror You 
(meaning one of the said liege Subjects of our 
said Lord the King with whom he was then and 
there conversing) would not fight against the 
French: damn the King (meaning our said Lord 
the King) and Country (meaning this Realm) and 
all his Subjects (meaning the Subjects of our said 
Lord the King) I (meaning himself the said Wm 
Blake) have told this before to greater people than 
you (meaning one of the said liege subjects of our 
said Lord the King with whom he was then and 
there conversing) damn the King (meaning our 
said Lord the King) and his Country (meaning 

this Realm) his Subjects (meaning the Subjects of 
105 


William Blake in This World 


our Lord the King) and all you Soldiers (meaning 
the Soldiers of our said Lord the King) are sold 
for Slaves’ to the great Scandal of our said Lord 
the King and his Laws to the Evil and pernicious 
Example of all others in the like case offending 
against the Peace of our said Lord the King his 
Crown and Dignity.” 

To this indictment Blake made his answer “not 
guilty,” and stood his trial at Chichester. ‘There, 
as to his “being a wicked and Seditious and Evil- 
disposed person,” Scofield made further charges. 
This Scofield was of the same ilk as that sharp- 
featured government agent who, spying upon 
Coleridge, and catching in Coleridge’s conversation 
with a friend the name of a celebrated philosopher, 
decided that he was being insulted, was being 
called “Spy Nozy.” Was Blake, asked Sco- 
field, not “a military painter”’—this was what 
came of doing well at miniature painting—and 
was it not probable that his cottage was stuffed 
with plans of the surrounding country prepared 
to aid the enemy? No, replied his advocate, 
Samuel Rose. He was an artist, and it is the 
tendency of art “to soften every asperity of 
feeling and of character, and to secure the 
bosom from the influence of those tumultuous 

106 


cA Bosom Secure from Tumultuous Passions 


and discordant passions which destroy the happi- 
ness of mankind.” No, said Hayley, forgetting 
Blake’s inflexibility and his own affected loftiness. 
No, said other neighbours; Blake was above all 
things a lover of peace. When to this testimony, 
surprising to Scofield if he remembered the strong 
arms that had held him all the way from 
Blake’s garden to the Fox Inn, was added the testi- 
mony of a next-door neighbour, a miller’s wife, 
who saw Blake turn Scofield before him down the 
road, and saw and heard all that happened at the 
gate of theinn, . . . that “no expression of threat- 
ening on account of sedition was uttered in the heat 
of their fury by either of the dragoons,” and the 
evidence of other “divers liege Subjects” that 
Blake had not said “damn the King (meaning our 
said Lord the King) and his Country (meaning 
this Realm) his Subjects (meaning the Subjects 
of our said Lord the King) and all you Soldiers 
(meaning the Soldiers of our said Lord the King) 
are sold for Slaves,” then the case was lost by 
Scofield. Blake, said the Sussex Advertiser, “was 
by the jury acquitted; which so gratified the 
auditory that the court was, in defiance of all 
decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy ex- 
ultations.” 
107 


William Blake in This World 


The uproar of those exultations was hardly 
silenced before Blake went up to London, leaving 
Felpham not to return, up to London, where he 
was to know “from two to seven in the Evening 
. . . Despair,” and where he was to make the 
“immense Profits,” of which he had dreamed, to 
make them, that is, for Mr. Cromek. 


108 


Xx 
The Heart of the Mystery 


. HY, look you now,” says Hamlet to 

Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, “how 
unworthy a thing you make of me! You would 
play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; 
you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you 
would sound me from my lowest note to the top 
of my compass: and there is much music, excellent 
voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it 
speak.” 

Recognizing tardily that there was much music, 
excellent voice, in William Blake, we would seem 
to know his stops; yet cannot we make him speak. 
For the heart of his mystery, mystery rooted deep 
in human experience, cannot be plucked out. Born 
a spiritualist under Sir Joshua Reynolds, a vision- 
ary under the philosophy of Newton and Locke, 
an enthusiast under George the Third, he was one 
in a longer, less hereditary line than that of Sir 
Joshua, of the Philosophers of Reason, or of the 
109 


¢ 


William Blake in This World 


House of Hanover. Belonging in that line he 
belonged in the “Land of Dreams,” which was, 
he wrote, 


better far 
Above the Light of the Morning Star. 


That is a land not charted, a land in which, though 
we may catch the remembered lift of hills, there 
are yet undiscovered continents and undiscoverable 
streams. 

The debate as to whether Blake was in his wits 
or not seems therefore a Lady-or-the-Tiger argu- 
ment. Wild and whirling words of his belie those 
who hold that he’was sane; pregnant replies of his 
confound the Poloniuses who think they have come 
upon the very cause of his lunacy. Nor does the 
application of a new terminology of physiology 
or of psychology penetrate far into the heart of 
his mystery. If there is a gland that “regulates” 
a visionary personality, Blake had it. But though 
the discovery of the gland might explain William 
Blake, what explains the gland? If there is a 
complex of self-assertion that finds relief by men- 
tal association with spirits, Blake had it. But to 
label the complex is not to explain it. To say con- 

110 


The Heart of the Mystery 


fidently that Blake suffered from mythomania, or 
from automatism, or from occasional hyper-zsthe- 
sia, or from manic-depressive tendencies, or that he 
did not tend “towards a definite schizophrenia,” is 
to add polysyllables rather than illumination to 
the discussion of his state. 

A world of entirely and obviously sane men 
would be a dull sort of place, describable in mono- 
syllables. William Blake helped save it from 
that level monotony by believing himself under 
the direction of messengers from heaven daily and 
nightly. This visionary life of his, whether or not 
it can be explained or profitably labelled, is not 
without interest for those who are attracted by the 
colour and variety of human experience. 

He had, in this connection, a live and let-live 
philosophy. “I should not have troubled you,” 
he wrote to a friend, “with this account of my 
spiritual state, unless it had been necessary in ex- 
plaining the actual cause of my uneasiness, into 
which you are so kind as to inquire; for I never 
obtrude such things on others unless questioned, 
and then I never disguise the truth.” Seymour 
Kirkup, who “was much with” Blake for seven 
years, spoke to Swinburne of “the courtesy with 
which, on occasion, Blake would waive the ques- 

111 


William Blake in This World 


tion of his spiritual life. . . . He would no more 
obtrude than suppress his faith, and would practi- 
cally accept and act upon the dissent or distaste 
of his companions without visible vexation or the 
rudeness of a thwarted fanatic.” “Though very 
ready to be drawn out to the assertion of his 
favourite ideas,”? reported Henry Crabb Robinson, 
“vet he showed no warmth as if he wanted to make 
proselytes—Indeed one of the peculiar features of 
his scheme . . . was indifference and a very high 
degree of tolerance.” 

Blake’s desire not to obtrude, and yet not to 
disguise or suppress the truth, his courtesy and 
high degree of tolerance, give a cue, suggest a 
mood, for the study of the spiritual experiences 
which were the heart of his mystery. 


A 
THE SPECTATORS IN THE SKY 


“T doubt not yet,” Blake wrote, “to make a fig- 
ure in the great dance of life that shall amuse the 
spectators in the sky.” 

The autobiographic period, which gives the 
fullest insight into the rhythm of the dance of 
life as Blake knew it, gives also the first full sight 

112 


The Heart of the Mystery 


of the spectators in the sky in whose presence the 
dancer felt himself. A glimpse of them is caught 
in letters exchanged between him and one John 
Trusler a year before he went down to Felpham. 
It is easy to see what figure Trusler meant to make. 
At sixty-four his mood was “whilst living in this 
world to wish to follow the nature of it.” That 
wish had led him to write books on Luxury No 
Political Evil, Principles of Politeness, A System 
of Etiquette, Rules for Behaviour during Meals, 
and Thé Way to be Rich and Respectable. The 
way to be rich and respectable was so sought that 
the book reached a seventh edition. With riches, 
eating, and respectability went learning. Trusler 
was the author of Detached Philosophic Thoughts, 
and of The Progress of Man and Society, from the 
Cradle to the Grave and from the Infancy of 
Things to their Present State. He established an 
academy for teaching oratory “mechanically.” He 
revealed A Sure Way to Lengthen Life with 
Vigour. 

In 1799 he ordered from Blake a series of draw- 
ings for which he, at Blake’s request, was to supply 
the ideas. To him Blake wrote in August, 1799: 
“T find more and more that my style of designing 
is a species by itself, and in this which I send you 

aL13 


William Blake in This World 


have been compelled by my Genius or Angel to 

follow where he led; if I were to act otherwise it 

would not fulfil the purpose for which alone I 

live . . . J attempted every morning for a fort- 

night together to follow your dictate, but when I 

found my attempts were in vain, resolved to show 
. independence. 

“T know I begged of you to give me your ideas, 
and promised to build on them. Here I counted 
without my host. I now find my mistake! ... 
And though I call [ my designs] mine, I know that 
they are not mine, being of the same opinion with 
Milton when he says that the Muse visits his slum- 
bers and awakes and governs his song when morn 
purples the east, and being also in the predicament 
of that prophet who says: ‘I cannot go beyond the 
command of the Lord, to speak good or bad!? 


«. . I know that this world is a world of 
imagination and vision. I see everything I paint 
in this world, but everybody does not see alike. 
To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beau- 
tiful than the sun, and.a bag worn with the use 
of money has more beautiful proportions than a 
vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves 
some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only 

114 


The Heart of the Mystery 


a green thing which stands in the way. Some see 
Nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I 
shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce 
see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man 
of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As 
a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such 
are its powers. You certainly mistake, when you 
say that the visions of fancy are not to be found in 
this world. To me this world is all one continued 
vision of fancy or imagination. . . .” 

Trusler answered that Blake’s fancy “seems to 
be in the other world, or the world of spirits, which 
accords not with my intentions,’ and closed the 
correspondence by endorsing Blake’s letter: “Blake, 
dim’d with superstition.” 

The spring after Blake found that he had 
counted without his host in planning to build on 
the ideas of a rich and respectable patron, he gave 
another glimpse of the spectators in the sky in a 
first letter to Hayley. Hayley had just lost a son, 
and to him in this bereavement Blake said: “I 
know that our deceased friends are more really 
with us than when they were apparent to our 
mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, 
and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in 
the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the 

115 


William Blake in This World 


regions of my imagination. I hear his advice, and 
even now write from his dictate. Forgive me for 
expressing to you my enthusiasm, which I wish 
all to partake of, since it is to me a source of im- 
mortal joy, even in this world. By it I am the 
companion of angels. May you continue to be so 
more and more; and to be more and more per- 
suaded that every mortal loss is an immortal 
gain. The ruins of Time build mansions in 
Eternity.” 

In letters which he wrote from Felpham to 
Flaxman and to Thomas Butts, Muster Master- 
General, a steady and loyal patron whom he had 
known some seven years, Blake made avowal 
after avowal of his visionary life. These avowals 
were made directly, unassumingly; they were part 
of the tissue of his everyday correspondence, un- 
planned, naive; they were sandwiched in with de- 
tails of the seven different chaises and as many 
different drivers, the sixteen heavy boxes and port- 
folios full of prints which went down to Felpham; 
with the drawings for Hayley’s library, the price 
of meat at Felpham, the miniatures, the plates for 
the Life of Cowper, which occupied him there. 

As soon as he arrived in Sussex he wrote to 
Flaxman: “Felpham is a sweet place for study, 

116 


The Heart of the Mystery 


because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven 
opens here on all sides her golden gates; her 
windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of 
celestial inhabitants are most distinctly heard, and 
their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage 
is also a shadow of their houses... . 

“And now begins a new life, because another 
covering of earth is shaken off. I am more famed 
in Heaven for my works than I could well con- 
ceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled 
with books and pictures of old, which I wrote and 
painted in ages of eternity before my mortal life; 
and those works are the delight and study of arch- 
angels. Why, then, should I be anxious about the 
riches or fame of mortality?” 

After a year of the new life he wrote to Butts 
in September, 1801: “I accomplish not one half 
of what I intend, because my abstract folly hurries 
me often away while I am at work, carrying me 
over mountains and valleys, which are not real, 
into a land of abstraction where spectres of the 
dead wander. This I endeavour to prevent; I, 
with my whole might, chain my feet to the world 
of duty and reality. But in vain! the faster I bind, 
the better is the ballast; for I, so far from being 
bound down, take the world with me in my flights, 

Bo 


William Blake in This World 


and often it seems lighter than a ball of wool 
rolled by the wind. . . . Alas! wretched, happy, 
ineffectual labourer of Time’s moments that I am! 
who shall deliver me from this spirit of abstraction 
and improvidence?” 

Blake further described his state in these lines: 


With Happiness stretch’d across the hills 

In a cloud that dewy sweetness distils; 

With a blue sky spread over with wings, 
And a mild sun that mounts and sings; 
With trees and fields full of fairy elves, 
And little devils who fight for themselves— 


With angels planted in hawthorn bowers, 
And God Himself in the passing Hours; 
With silver angels across my way, 

And golden demons that none can stay; 
With my father hovering upon the wind, 
And my brother Robert just behind, 

And my brother John, the evil one, 

In a black cloud making his moan,— 

Tho’ dead, they appear upon my path, 
Notwithstanding my terrible wrath; 

‘They beg, they entreat, they drop their tears, 
Fil?d full of hopes, fill’d full of fears— 
With a thousand angels upon the wind, 
Pouring disconsolate from behind 


118 


The Heart of the Mystery 


To drive them off, and before my way 

A frowning thistle implores my stay. 

What to others a trifle appears 

Fills me full of smiles or tears; 

For double the vision my eyes do see, 

And a double vision is always with me. 
With my inward eye, ’tis an Old Man grey, 
With my outward, a Thistle across my way. 


In a letter to Butts he made one of his most 
specific affirmations: “I am not ashamed, afraid, 
or averse to tell you what ought to be told: that I 
am under the direction of messengers from heaven, 
daily and nightly. But the nature of such things 
is not, as some suppose, without trouble and care. 
. . - If we fear to do the dictates of our angels, 
and tremble at the tasks set before us; if we refuse 
to do spiritual acts because of natural fears or nat- 
ural desires, who can describe the dismal torments 
of such a state! I too well remember the threats 
I heard!—‘If you, who are organized by Divine 
Providence for spiritual communion, refuse, and 
bury your talent in the earth, even though you 
should want natural bread, sorrow and desperation 
pursue you through life, and after death shame 
and confusion of face to eternity. Every one in 
eternity will leave you, aghast at the man who was 

119 


William Blake in This World 


crowned with glory and honour by his brethren, 
and betrayed their cause to their enemies. You 
will be called the base Judas who betrayed his 
friend!? Such words would make any stout man 
tremble, and how then could I be at ease?” 

Felpham was no longer sweet, and London be- 
came the city of escape. There, Biake felt, he 
could carry on his “visionary studies . . . unan- 
noyed.”. ‘There only, he wrote, “I can’) ) cone 
verse with my friends in eternity, see visions, 
dream dreams, and prophesy and speak parables 
unobserved... 27? 

From London he wrote back to Hayley: 

“You, dear Sir, are one who has my particular 
gratitude, having conducted me through three 
... years... which were rendered through 
your means a mild and pleasant slumber. I speak 
of spiritual things, not of natural; of things known 
only to myself and to spirits good and evil, but not 
known to men on earth.” 

The spirits good and evil were, it appeared in 
the letters to Hayley, sometimes artists or the ene- 
mies of art. Thus in 1804, two years after Rom- 
ney’s death, Blake wrote of plates he was engrav- 
ing after Romney, “whose spiritual aid has not a 
little conduced to my restoration to the light of 

120 


The Heart of the Mystery 


Art.” A year later he wrote: “It is the greatest of 
crimes to depress true art and science. I know 
that those who are dead from the earth, and who 
mocked and despised the meekness of true art, 
. . . | know that such mockers are most severely 
punished in eternity. I know it, for I see it and 
dare not help.” 

In these naive letters, in which the spectators in 
the sky are as real a part of the great dance of 
life as everyday business, engraving, rheumatism, 
and the need of ten pounds, Blake made to his ac- 
quaintances his avowals of faith. He was not 
afraid, ashamed, or averse to tell them one and 
all under whose direction he walked daily and 
nightly. 

He was no less afraid, ashamed, or averse to tell 
the public of his visions and of his faith. He 
wrote at the beginning of his illustrations to Blair’s 
Grave: 


To dedicate to England’s Queen 

The visions that my soul has seen, 
And, by her kind permission, bring 
What I have borne on solemn wing, 
From the vast regions of the Grave, 
Before her throne my wings I wave; 


121 


William Blake in This World 


Bowing before my Sov’reign’s feet, 

“The Grave produc’d these blossoms sweet 
In mild repose from earthly strife; 

The blossoms of Eternal Life!” 


Blake drank the cup of the Examiner’s attack, 
he forgot mild repose from earthly strife; but he 
did not deny his comrades of the day and of the 
night. “The Caverns of the Grave I’ve seen,” he 
wrote, in verses not published, but evidently in- 
tended for publication as a dedication to the 
Countess of Egremont of his painting of The Last 
Judgement: 


The Caverns of the Grave I’ve seen, 
And these I show’d to England’s Queen. 
But now the Caves of Hell I view, 

Who shall I dare to show them to? 
What mighty soul in Beauty’s form 
Shall dauntless view the infernal storm? 
Egremont’s Countess can control 

The flames of Hell that round me roll; 
If she refuse, I still go on 

Till the Heavens and Earth are gone, 
Still admir’d by noble minds, 

Follow’d by Envy on the winds, 
Re-engrav’d time after time, 

Ever in their youthful prime, 


122 


The Heart of the Mystery 


My designs unchang’d remain. 

Time may rage, but rage in vain. 
For above ‘Time’s troubled fountains, 
On the great Atlantic Mountains, 
In my Golden House on high, 

There they shine eternally. 


Following the bitter draught of Cromek’s 
double dealing and of Hunt’s attack, Blake set 
down, in the Descriptive Catalogue, in the Adver- 
tisements to Blake’s Canterbury Pilgrims, and in 
Additions to Blake’s Catalogue of Pictures, along 
with much “Resentment for personal injuries,” 
which, he admitted, had had some share in his 
words, a series of statements of his imaginative 
creed: “The artist having been taken in vision into 
the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates 
of Asia has seen those wonderful originals, called 
in the sacred scriptures the Cherubim, which were 
sculptured and painted on walls of Temples, ‘Tow- 
ers, Cities, Palaces, and erected in the highly 
cultivated states of Egypt, Moab, Edom, Aram, 
among the Rivers of Paradise. . . . The artist 
has endeavoured to emulate the grandeur of those 
seen in his vision, and to apply it to modern Heroes 
on a smaller scale. . . . Those wonderful orig- 

| 123 


William Blake in This World 


inals seen in my Visions were, some of them, one 
hundred feet in height: some were painted as pic- 
tures and some carved as basso-relievos and some 
as groups of statues, all containing mythological 
and recondite meaning, when more is meant than 
meets the eye. 


“The Prophets describe what they saw in vision 
as real and existing men, whom they saw with their 
imaginative and immortal organs; the Apostles the 
same; the clearer the organ the more distinct the 
object. A spirit and a vision are not, as the mod- 
ern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a 
nothing. They are organized and minutely articu- 
lated beyond all that the mortal and perishing 
nature can produce. He who does not imagine in 
stronger and better lineaments and in stronger and 
better light than his perishing and mortal eye can 
see, does not imagine at all. The painter of this 
work asserts that all his imaginations appear to him 
infinitely more perfect and more minutely organ- 
ized than anything seen by his mortal eye. 


“Unworthy Men who gain fame among Men 
continue to govern mankind after death, and in 
124 


The Heart of the Mystery 


their spiritual bodies oppose the spirits of those 
who worthily are famous, and, as Swedenborg ob- 
serves, by entering into disease and excrement, 
drunkenness, and concupiscence, they possess them- 
selves of the bodies of mortal men, and shut the 
doors of mind and thought by placing Learning 
above Inspiration. O Artists, you may disbelieve 
all this, but it shall be at your own peril. 


“These pictures, among numerous others painted 
for experiment, were the result of temptations and 
perturbations, seeking to destroy imaginative 
power, by means of that infernal machine called 
Chiaro Oscuro, in the hands of Venetian and 
Flemish Demons, whose enmity to the Painter 
himself, and to all Artists who study the Floren- 
tine and Roman Schools, may be removed by an 
exhibition and exposure of their vile tricks. They 
cause that everything in art shall become a Ma- 
chine. They cause that execution shall all be 
blocked up with brown shadows. ‘They put the 
original artist in fear and doubt of his own orig- 
inal conception. The spirit of Titian was particu- 
larly active in raising doubts concerning the possi- 
bility of executing without a model; and when 

125 


William Blake in This World 


once he had raised the doubt, it became easy for 
him to snatch away the vision time after time, for, 
when the Artist took his pencil to execute his ideas, 
his power of imagination weakened so much and 
darkened, that memory of nature, and of Pictures 
of the various schools possessed his mind instead 
of appropriate execution resulting from the inven- 
tions,—like walking in another man’s style, or 
speaking, or looking in another man’s style and 
manner, unappropriate and repugnant to your own 
individual character,—tormenting the true Artist. 
. . .« Rubens is a most outrageous demon, and by 
infusing the remembrances of his pictures and 
style of execution, hinders all power of individual 
thought, so that the man who is possessed of this 
demon loses all admiration of any other Artist but 
Rubens, and those who were his imitators and 
journeymen. . . . Correggio is a soft and effem- 
inate, and consequently most cruel demon, whose 
whole delight is to cause endless labour to who- 
ever suffers him to enter his mind. ... I say 
again, O Artist! you may disbelieve all this, but 
it shall be at your own Peril. 


“The Last Judgement is not fable or allegory, 
but Vision. Fable or allegory is a totally distinct 
126 


The Heart of the Mystery 


and inferior kind of poetry. Vision, or imagina- 
tion, is a representation of what actually exists 
really, and unchangeably. 

“The Nature of visionary fancy or imagination 
is very little known, and the eternal nature and 
permanence of its ever existent images is considered 
less permanent than the things of vegetable and 
generative nature. Yet the oak dies as well as the 
lettuce, but its eternal image or individuality never 
dies but renews by its seed. Just so the imagina- 
tive image returns by the seed of contemplative 
raougnt... . « 

“The world of imagination is the world of 
eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we all 
go after the death of the vegetated body. This 
world of imagination is infinite and eternal, 
whereas the world of generation or vegetation is 
finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal 
world the eternal realities of everything which 
we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature. 

“Tf the spectator could enter into these images in 
his imagination, approaching them on the fiery 
chariot of his contemplative thought—if he could 
enter into Noah’s rainbow, could make a friend 

127 


William Blake in This World 


and companion of one of these images of wonder, 
which always entreat him to leave mortal things 
(as he must know), then would he arise from the 
grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, 
and then he would be happy. 


“T assert for myself that I do not behold the 
outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance, 
and not action. It is as the dirt upon my feet— 
no part of me. 

“What,” it will be questioned, ‘when the sun 
rises do you not see a round disk of fire something 
like a guinea?? Oh! no! no! I see an innumer- 
able company of the heavenly host crying—‘Holy, 
holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty!’ I ques- 
tion not my corporeal eye any more than I would 
question a window concerning a sight. I look 
through it and not with it. 


“Tmagination is my World.” 


Thus William Blake, whose lot among Eng- 
lish poets and painters was to give a dash of in- 
timacy with the spectators in the sky to the 
varieties of the creative temperament, left, in 
letters and in public statements, his avow- 

128 


The Heart of the Mystery 


als of that intimacy, not obtruding and not dis- 
guising or suppressing what was to him the truth. 

The truth was that the celestial spectators in 
whose presence he walked and worked were of 
varied sorts. ‘They were at times the spirits of 
those whom he had known on earth, his deceased 
friends. Such were the spirits of his brother Rob- 
ert, of his father, of his brother John, of the 
painter Romney. At other times the great dead, 
Milton, Shakespeare, showed him their faces or 
gave him their hands. Again vague guardians 
bore him on their wings, his angels, messengers 
from heaven, familiars who watched over him. 
Still again multitudes of spirits, a thousand angels, 
rode the winds before him. Finally abstractions 
whom he called Titian, Rubens, Correggio, ghosts 
of principles of painting, tormented him. They 
were no more individual spirits than that infernal 
machine calied Chiaro Oscuro, in whose company 
they belonged. 

These celestial spectators being, in Blake’s 
words, good and evil, had something to do with 
the downward as well as with the upward swing 
of the rhythm to which he moved. The nature of 
such things he found to be not, as some suppose, 
without trouble or care. He saw his brother John, 


129 


William Blake in This World 


the evil one 
In a black cloud making his moan, 


He saw the infernal storm; he saw unworthy men 
after their deaths continuing to govern mankind; 
he saw mockers who had committed the greatest 
of crimes, that of depressing true art and science, 
once they were dead from the earth severely pun- 
ished in eternity; he saw and he dared not help; 
he was tormented as he tried to paint by outrageous 
demons. 

The power, by which he was familiar with these 
varied spirits, good and evil, had by his account 
two functions. What the second was appeared in 
his longing to be back in London. There, he 
thought, he could not only converse with his 
friends in eternity, but also see visions, dream 
dreams. These were the two functions; the first 
to converse with spirits; the second to see visions, 
dream dreams. 

These visions and dreams, he said, were not a 
cloudy vapour or a nothing. They were organized 
and minutely articulated; they appeared to him 
infinitely more perfect than anything seen by his 
mortal eye; they seemed to him to be a representa- 
tion of what actually exists and unchangeably; 
their nature was permanent and perfect; they were 


130 


The Heart of the Mystery 


the eternal realities of idealism. They existed not 
only far away and long ago, but they were here 
and now beside him, in a world which was all one 
continued vision of fancy or imagination. They 
gave a deeper meaning to his experience. A 
double vision was with him. 


With my inward eye, ’tis an Old Man grey, 
With my outward, a Thistle across my way. 


The tree which in the eyes of others was only 
a green thing that stood in the way moved him to 
tears of joy. When the sun rose he did not see 
a round disk of fire something like a guinea. Oh, 
no! no! He saw an innumerable company of the 
heavenly host crying “Holy, holy, holy, is the 
Lord God Almighty.” If this function of vision, 
enriching, deepening experience, giving beauty and 
significance to the thistle, the tree, and the rising 
sun, is not the creative imagination, the poetic im- 
pulse, and no other, what is it? 


B 
THE POEM DICTATED BY AUTHORS IN ETERNITY 


In 1803 Blake began to mention in his letters a 
long poem which came to him from a celestial 
source and which described “the spiritual acts” of 

131 


William Blake in This World 


his “three years’ slumber on the banks of ocean” 
at Felpham. In January he wrote to his brother 
James of “many formidable works” which he had 
ready and in April he told his friend Butts that he 
had “composed an immense number of verses on 
one grand theme.” ... “I have written this 
poem,” he went on, “from immediate dictation, 
twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a 
time, without premeditation, and even against my 
will. The time it has taken in writing was thus 
rendered nonexistent, and an immense poem exists 
which seems to be the labour of a long life, all 
produced without labour or study.” 

In July he wrote again to Butts: “I hope... 
to speak to future generations by a sublime alle- 
gory, which is now perfectly completed into a 
grand poem. I may praise it, since I dare not 
pretend to be any other than the secretary; the 
authors are in eternity. . . . This poem shall, by 
Divine assistance, be progressively printed and 
ornamented with prints, and given to the Public.” 

In December, 1805, he wrote to Hayley: “It 
will not be long before I shall be able to present 
the full history of my spiritual sufferings to the 
dwellers upon earth and of the spiritual victories 
obtained for me by my friends.” In 1809, in 

| 132 


The Heart of the Mystery 


his Descriptive Catalogue, he told of a “volumi- 
nous” poem which he had written “under inspira- 
tion” and would, “if God please, publish.” In 
1810 he was still writing of “a poem concerning 
my three years’ Herculean labours at Felpham, 
which I shall soon publish.” In 1811, according 
-to Henry Crabb Robinson, Blake showed Southey 
“a perfectly mad poem, called Jerusalem. Oxford 
Street isin Jerusalem.” In 1820 “Janus Weather- 
cock” (T. G. Wainwright) referred in the Lon- 
don Magazine to “a tremendous piece of ordnance, 
an eighty-eight pounder! .. . an ancient, newly 
discovered, illuminated manuscript, which has to 
name Jerusalem.” ‘This “tremendous piece” it was 
proposed “to fire off” in the next issue of the 
magazine. Yet seven years later, in his last year, 
Blake wrote Cumberland that he had “finished,” 
that is, tinted by hand, one copy of Jerusalem, and 
that it was not likely that he would be able to find 
even for that one copy a customer. 

This poem of celestial authorship and persist- 
ently belated publication exists now in the two 
works Milton and Jerusalem. 

“The Felpham Gospel,” as it has been called, 
Blake, not pretending to be any other than the sec- 
retary, dared to praise. “I consider it,”? he wrote, 

133 


William Blake in This World 


“as the grandest poem that this world contains. 
Allegory addressed to the intellectual powers, 
while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal 
understanding, is my definition of the most 
sublime poetry.” 

The mystical and mythical figures which swarm 
upon the pages of “the Felpham Gospel” have 
proved in the main, in obedience to Blake’s defini- 
tion, to be hidden from the corporeal understand- 
ing. Butas they carry on their debates where more 
is meant than meets the ear, they drop now and 
again into quite intelligible English and speak with 
sharply clear instead of with hidden meaning. In 
such clear passages there exists, wrenched of course 
out of its context of symbolism and dramatic in- 
tention; freed, if you please, of its mythomania, a 
body of doctrine that illuminates the allegiances of 
the authors in eternity and the abilities and en- 
thusiasms of their secretary. 

To begin with, the diction and verse form had 
to be settled —“the Measure in which the... 
Poem is written.” “We who dwell on earth,” 
began Blake, “can do nothing of ourselves; every- 
thing is conducted by Spirits, no less than Diges- 
tion or Sleep’. . . 


134 


The Heart of the Mystery 


When this Verse was first dictated to me, I con- 
sider’d a monotonous cadence . . . to be a neces- 
sary and indispensable part of Verse. But I soon 
found that . . . such monotony was not only 
awkward, but as much a bondage as rime itself. I 
therefore have produced a variety in every line, 
both of cadences and number of syllables. Every 
word and every letter is studied and put into its 
fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the 
terrific parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and 
‘ gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts; all 
are necessary toeach other. Poetry fetter’d fetters 
the Human Race.” 

“We do not want either Greek or Roman 
models if we are but just and true to our own 
Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which 
we shall live for ever. .. .” 

The celestial authors who thus enforced on 
their secretary a theory of freedom, of a variety 
of numbers including even prosaic numbers; who 
thus proposed to unfetter poetry, to defy classic 
models, and to be true to their own imaginations, 
belonged, I take it, to the romantic movement. 

These authors belonged to the romantic move- 
ment not only by their general poetic theory, but 

1235 


William Blake in This World 


also by their frequent mood of delight in birds, 
flowers, insects, the English country, sung in mild 
and gentle numbers: 


The Lark, sitting upon his earthy bed, just as the 
morn 

Appears, listens silent; then, springing from the wav- 
ing cornfield, loud 

He leads the Choir of Day—trill! trill! trill! trill! 

Mounting upon the wings of light into the great Ex- 
panse, 

Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining heavenly 
Shell; 

His little throat labours with inspiration .. . 

Then loud from their green covert all the Birds begin 
their song: 

The Thrush, the Linnet and the Goldfinch, Robin and 
the Wren 

Awake the Sun from his sweet revery upon the moun- 
tain: 

Thou perceivest the Flowers put forth their precious 
Odours; 

And none can tell how from so small a centre comes 
such sweet, 

Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands 

Its ever-during doors... 


136 


The Heart of the Mystery 


First, ere the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery 
bosoms, 

Joy even to tears, which the Sun rising dries: first the 
Wild ‘Thyme 

And Meadow-sweet, downy and soft, waving among 
the reeds, 

Light springing on the air, lead the sweet dance; they 
wake 

The Honeysuckle sleeping on the oak; the flaunting 
beauty 

Revels along upon the wind; the White-thorn, lovely 
May, 

Opens her many lovely eyes; listening the Rose still 
sleeps— 

None dare to wake her; soon she bursts her crimson- 


curtained bed 
7 . . . Every Flower, 


The Pink, the Jessamine, the Wallflower, the Carna- 
tion, 

The Jonquil, the mild Lily opes her heavens; every 
Tree 

And Flower and Herb soon fill the air with an in- 
numerable dance, 

Yet all in order sweet and lovely. 


Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance and 
sport in summer 

Upon the sunny brooks and meadows: every one the 
dance 


137 


William Blake in This World 


Knows in its intricate mazes of delight, artful to 
weave, 

Each one to sound his instruments of music in the 
dance, 

To touch each other and recede; to cross and change 
and return. 


. the Centipede is there, 
The Ground-spider with many eyes, the Mole clothéd 
in velvet, 
The ambitious Spider in his sullen web, the lucky 
Golden-spinner, 
The Earwig arm’d, the tender Maggot, emblem of 


Immortality. ... 


The a Slug, ie Ciscahannen ike nik ie laughs 
and drinks— 

Winter comes: he folds his slender bones without a 
murmur. . 


All this earthly life, from the lark to the grass- 
hopper to man, in which the authors in eternity, 
true romanticists, delighted, has limitless depth 
and capacity. Within the small centre of the 
flower 

. Eternity expands 
Its ever-during doors... . 


and 138 


The Heart of the Mystery 


How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, 
Is an immense World of Delight... ? 


See’st thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain 
of sand? 

It has a heart like thee, a brain open to heaven and hell, 

With inside wondrous and expansive, its gates are not 
clos’d. 


. the tree knows not what is outside of its leaves and 
bark 
And yet it drinks the summer joy and fears the winter 
sorrow. 


In every bosom a Universe expands, 


. there is no Limit of Expansion; there is no Limit 
of ‘Translucence 
In the bosom of Man for ever from eternity to eternity. 


This immense World of Delight is “closed to 
your senses five.” 


They told me that the night and day were all that I 
could see; 
They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up; 
And they inclosed my infinite brain into a narrow circle, 
And sunk my heart into the abyss, a red round globe 
hot burning, 
139 


William Blake in This World 


Till all from life I was obliterated and erased. 

Instead of morn arises a bright shadow, like an eye 

In the eastern cloud; instead of night a sickly charnel 
house. 


Ah! weak and wide astray! Ah, shut in narrow, dole- 
ful form! 
Creeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the ground; 
The Eye of Man, a little narrow orb, closed up and 
dark, 
Scarcely beholding the Great Light, conversing with the 
ground; 
The Ear, a little shell, in small volutions shutting out 
True Harmonies, and comprehending great as very 
small; 
The Nostrils bent down to the earth and clos’d with 
senseless flesh, : 
“That odours cannot them expand, nor joy on them 
exult; 

The Tongue, a little moisture fills, a little food it 
cloys, 

A little sound it utters, and its cries are faintly heard. 
. and that Human Form 

You call Divine, is but a Worm seventy inches long, 

That creeps forth in a night and is dried in the morn- 
ing sun. 


140 


The Heart of the Mystery 


This earthly creation, so infinite and so finite 
in capacity, is shadowed by spectres of the eight- 
eenth century. 


Voltaire insinuates that these Limits are the cruel work 
of God, 
Mocking the Remover of Limits and the Resurrection 


of the Dead. 


I turn my eyes to the Schools and Universities of 
Europe, 

And there behold the Loom of Locke... 

Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton... 


And this is the manner of the Sons of Albion in their 
strength: 

They take the two Contraries which are call’d Qualities, 
with which 

Every Substance is clothéd; they name them Good and 
Evil. 

From them they make an Abstract, which is a Nega- 
le ge 


. . . It is the Reasoning Power, 

An Abstract objecting power, that negatives everything. 

This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy Reasoning 
Power, ... 


141 


William Blake in This World 


- . » the Spectre, like a hoar-frost and a mildew, rose 
over Albion, 

Saying, “I am God, O Sons of Man! Iam your Ra- 
tional Power! 

Am I not Bacon and Newton and Locke, who teach 
Humility to Man, 

Who teach Doubt and Experiment? and my two wings, 
Voltaire, Rousseau? 

Where is that Friend of. Sinners, that Rebel against my 
Laws, 

Who teaches Belief to the Nations and an unknown 
Eternal Life? 

Come hither into the desert and turn these stones to 
bread! 

Vain, foolish Man! wilt thou believe without Experi- 
ment, 

And build a World of Phantasy upon my great 
Abyss 0, Se" 

So spoke the hard, cold, constructive Spectre. 

I stood among my valleys of the south, 

And saw a flame of fire, even as a Wheel of fire sur- 
rounding all the heavens. .. . 

By it the Sun was roll’d into an orb; 

By it the Moon faded into a globe, 

Travelling thro’ the night; for from its dire 

And restless fury Man himself shrunk up 

Into a little root a fathom long. 


142 


The Heart of the Mystery 


And I askéd a Watcher and a Holy One 

Its name. He answer’d: “It is the Wheel of Religion.” 
I wept and said: “Is this the law of Jesus, 

This terrible devouring sword turning every way?” 

He answer’d: “Jesus died because He strove 

Against the current of this Wheel: its name 

Is Caiaphas, the dark Preacher of Death, 

Of sin, of sorrow, and of punishment, 

Opposing Nature. It is Natural Religion.” 


“Every religion that Preaches Vengeance for 
Sin is the religion of the Enemy and Avenger, 
and not of the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is 
Satan, Named by the Divine Name. Your Reli- 
gion, O Deists! Deism is the worship of the God 
of this World by the means of what you call 
Natural Religion and Natural Philosophy .. .” 


Gibbon arose with a lash of steel, 

And Voltaire with a racking wheel; 

The Schools, in clouds of learning roll’d, 
Arose with War in iron and gold. 


When Satan first the black bow bent 
And the Moral Law from the Gospel rent, 
He forg’d the Law into a sword, 
And spill’d the blood of Mercy’s Lord. 
| 143 


William Blake in This World 


Against these spectres of Blake’s mind, rational 
power, natural religion, Satan’s “Moral law” of 
vengeance, the authors in eternity offered guard. 


And many converséd on these things as they labour’d 
at the furrow, 

Saying, “It is better to prevent misery than to release 
from misery, 

It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal. 

Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the 
Little Ones, 

And those who are in misery cannot remain so long, 

If we but do our duty; labour well the teeming Earth.” 


The labour was not to be all of the hand, all 
directed at the teeming earth. 


Our Wars are wars of life, and wounds of love, 
With intellectual spears, and long wingéd arrows of 
thought. 


To the Satan who is the god of the deists Milton 
is made to say: 


Thy purpose and the purpose of thy Priests and of thy 
Churches 

Is to impress on men the fear of death: to teach 

Trembling and fear, terror, constriction, abject selfish- 
ness. 


144 


The Heart of the Mystery 


Mine is to teach Men to despise death, and to go on 

In fearless majesty, annihilating Self, laughing to 
scorn 

Thy Laws and terrors, shaking down thy Synagogues 
as webs. 


Blake himself seems to say: 


. . « Go to these Fiends of Righteousness, 

Tell them to obey their Humanities, and not pretend 
Holiness, 

When they are murderers; .. . 

Go tell them that the Worship of God is honouring 
His gifts 

In other men, and loving the greatest men best, each 
according 

To his Genius, which is the Holy Ghost in Man: there 
is no other 

God than that God who is the intellectual fountain of 
Humanity. 

He who envies or calumniates, which is murder and 
cruelty, 

Murders the Holy One. Go tell them this, and over- 
throw their cup, 

Their bread, their altar-table, their incense, and their 
oath, 

Their marriage and their baptism, their burial and con- 
secration. 


145 


William Blake in This World 


I have tried to make friends by corporeal gifts, but 
have only 

Made enemies; I never made friends but by spiritual 
gifts, 

By severe contentions of friendship, and the burning 
fire of thought. 


“Rouse up, O Young Men of the New Age! 
Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! 
For we have hirelings in the Camp, the Court, and 
the University, who would, if they could, for ever 
depress mental and prolong corporeal war.” 

“T know of no other Christianity and of no 
other Gospel than the liberty both of body and 
mind to exercise the Divine arts of Imagination— 
Imagination, the real and Eternal World of which 
this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, and 
in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imagina- 
tive Bodies when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies 
areno more. The Apostles knew of no other Gos- 
pel. What were all their spiritual gifts? What 
is the Divine Spirit? Is the Holy Ghost any other 
than an Intellectual Fountain? What is the 
harvest of the Gospel and its labours? What is 

146 


The Heart of the M ystery 


that talent which it is a curse to hide? What are 
the treasures of Heaven which we are to lay up for 
ourselves? Are they any other than mental studies 
and performances? What are all the gifts of the 
Gospel? Are they not all mental gifts? Is Goda 
spirit who must be worshipped in spirit and in 
truth? And are not the gifts of the Spirit every- 
thing to Man? O ye Religious, discountenance 
every one among you who shall pretend to despise 
Art and Science. I call upon you in the name of 
Jesus! What is the life of Man but Art and 
Science? Is it meat and drink? Is not the Body 
more than raiment? What is Mortality but the 
things relating to the Body, which dies? What is 
Immortality but the things relating to the Spirit, 
which lives eternally? What is the Joy of Heaven 
but improvement in the things of the Spirit? 
What are the Pains of Hell but Ignorance, Bodily 
Lust, Idleness, and devastation of the things of 
the Spirit? Answer this to yourselves, and expel 
from among you those who pretend to despise the 
labours of Art and Science, which alone are the 
labours of the Gospel. Is not this plain and mani- 
fest to the thought? Can you think at all, and 
not pronounce heartily: that to labour in knowledge 
is to build up Jerusalem; and to despise knowledge 
147 


William Blake in This World 


is to despise Jerusalem and her Builders? And re- 
member: He who despises and mocks a mental 
gift in another, calling it pride and selfishness and 
sin, mocks Jesus, the giver of every mental gift, 
which always appear to the ignorance-loving 
hypocrite as sins; but that which is a sin in the sight 
of cruel Man, is not so in the sight of our kind 
God. Let every Christian, as much as in him 
lies, engage himself openly and publicly, before all 
the World, in some mental pursuit for the Build- 
ing up of Jerusalem.” 

For a Tear is an Intellectual thing; 

And a Sigh is the sword of an angel king; 

And the bitter groan of a Martyr’s woe 

Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow. 


Bring me my bow of burning gold! 
Bring me my arrows of desire! 

Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! 
Bring me my chariot of fire! 


I will not cease from mental fight, 

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, 
Till we have built Jerusalem 

In England’s green and pleasant land. 


148 


The Heart of the Mystery 


I care not whether a Man is Good or Evil; all that I 
care 

Is whether he is a Wise man or a Fool. Go! put off 
Holiness, 

And put on Intellect; ... 


Since William Blake knelt before those who told 
him these things, who told him to labour well the 
minute particulars, to go on in wars of life, with 
intellectual spears and long winged arrows of 
thought, not ceasing from mental fight until Jeru- 
salem was built in England’s green and pleasant 
land; since to the expressing of these allegiances 
he gave his abilities and his enthusiasms, the 
burning fire of thought; since he dared not pretend 
to be any other than the secretary, not here naming 
himself a captain in the war, the words which 
Heine wished said of himself might, in paraphrase, 
fittingly be said of Blake: “Lay on his coffin a 
sword; he wasa soldier in the intellectual war.” 


C 


THE SPECTATORS ON THE EARTH 


In his letters, his public statements, and the 
history of his three years’ slumber on the banks of 
149 


William Blake in This World 


ocean, the affectionate enthusiastic hope-fostered 
visionary, the wretched happy ineffectual labourer 
of time’s moments, the soldier in the intellectual 
war, told how, though with his whole might he 
chained his feet to the world of duty and reality, 
yet so far from being bound down he took the 
world with him in his flights, living day and night 
in the presence of spectators in the sky. 

He lived also necessarily, like another poet who 
was unceasingly beating in the void his luminous 
Wings, in the presence of spectators on the earth. 
What did they make of the man to whom this 
world was all one continued vision of fancy or 
imagination? 

Only in the last years of Blake’s life did the 
spectators on the earth tell, in any detail, what they 
made of him. These were the biographical, as the 
years at Felpham were the autobiographical, years. 
These were the years which touched the heart of 
Blake’s mystery from the outside, as the years at 
Felpham touched it from the inside. Before them 
came only Malkin’s defence of him in 1806 against 
“the sceptic and the rational believer [ who], unit- 
ing their forces against the visionary, pursue and 
scare a warm and brilliant imagination with the hue 
and cry of madness,” and the Examiner’s attack on 

150 


The Heart of the Mystery 


him as “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal 
inoffensiveness secures him from confinement.” 
Without these last years there would be, on the 
one side, his writings; on the other side, the studies 
of later students and biographers, and between, a 
great gulf fixed, unbridged by any record of the 
impressions of his everyday companions. The 
years after 1818 throw a bridge across the gulf, 
a bizarre bridge to be sure, the foundations of 
which nevertheless go down to first-hand testi- 
monial evidence. 

One arch in the bridge was put in place by a 
grotesque pair of astrologers, R. C. Smith, alias 
Merlinus Anglicanus, Junior, and John Varley, 
who, not being named Smith, needed no alias. R. 
C. Smith distributed the Royal Book of Fate; John 
Varley distributed pills. R. C. Smith, with the 
assistance of the Metropolitan Society of Occult 
Philosophers, edited a magazine called Urania, 
which, even with this sonorous midwifery, died at 
birth. John Varley stopped people on the street 
to predict their future, making a few hits and more 
than fifty percent of misses. Both apparently 
were not only astrologers, but unlucky ones. 

Being astrologers, they could explain anything. 
Smith, “several times in company” with Blake, 
3 151 


William Blake in This World 


“frequently delighted with his conversation, but 
also filled with feelings of wonder at his extraor- 
dinary faculties,” had no trouble in an article in 
Urania to account for his “peculiar . . . turn of 
genius and vivid imagination . .. outré ideas 

. curious intercourse with the invisible world 
. .. [and] actual conversations with Michael 
Angelo, Raphael, Milton, Dryden, and the worth- 
ies of antiquity.” ‘These phenomenz were all, he 
found, due to Blake’s nativity; they were “the 
effects of the Moon in Cancer in the twelfth house 
(both sign and house being mystical), in trine to 
Herschell from the mystical sign Pisces, from the 
house of science, and from the mundane trine to 
Saturn in the scientific sign Aquarius, which latter 
planet is in square to Mercury in Scorpio, and in 
quintile to the Sun and Jupiter, in the mystical sign 
Sagittarius.” 

Varley, if more of a man than Smith, was as 
much a quack. Though he had a measure of artis- 
tic ability and was “the father of modern water- 
colours,” he shone preéminently in credulity. He 
believed in astrology; he believed in his own pre- 
dictions; “he believed nearly all he heard and all 
he read;” he believed in the visions of Blake, said 
a friend, more than did Blake himself. 

he 


The Heart of the Mystery 


He had much more to do with Blake than did 
Smith. He sat beside him, not several times, but — 
night after night, watching Blake draw the Vision- 
ary Fleads. ‘These were pictures of spirits who, 
Blake said, came to him for their portraits. Varley 
told Allan Cunningham: “I know much about 
Blake—I was his companion for nine years. I 
have sat beside him from ten at night till three in 
the morning, sometimes slumbering and some- 
times waking, but Blake never slept; he sat with 
a pencil and paper drawing portraits of those whom 
I most desired to see. I will show you, sir, some 
of these works.” Varley then took out a large 
book filled with drawings, opened it, and contin- 
ued: “Observe the poetic fervour of that face—it 
is Pindar as he stood a conqueror in the Olympic 
games. And this lovely creature is Corinna, who 
conquered in poetry in the same place. That lady 
is Lais, the courtesan—with the impudence which 
is part of her profession, she stept in between Blake 
and Corinna, and he was obliged to paint her to get 
her away. There! that is a face of a different 
stamp—can you conjecture who he is?” “Some 
scoundrel, I should think, sir,” said Cunningham. 
“There now—that is a strong proof of the accu- 
racy of Blake—he is a scoundrel indeed! The 

| 153 


Wiliam Blake in This World | 


very individual task-master whom Moses slew in 
Egypt. And who is this now—only imagine who 
this is?” “Other than a good one, I doubt, sir.” 
“You are right, it is the Devil—he resembles, and 
this is remarkable, two men who shall be nameless; 
one is a great lawyer, and the other—I wish I durst 
name him—is a suborner of false witnesses. This 
other head now?—this speaks for itself—it is the 
head of Herod; how like an eminent officer in the 
army!” 

He closed the book and, taking out a small 
panel from a private drawer, said: “This is the last 
which I shall show you; but it is the greatest 
curiosity of all. Only look at the splendour of 
the colouring and the original character of the 
thing!” “I see,” said Cunningham, “a naked 
figure with a strong bady and a short neck—with 
burning eyes which long for moisture, and a face 
worthy of a murderer, holding a bloody cup in its 
clawed hands, out of which it seems eager to drink. 
I never saw any shape so strange, nor did I ever see 
any colouring so curiously splendid—a kind of 
glistening green and dusky gold, beautifully var- 
nished. But what in the world is it?” “It is a 
ghost, sir—the ghost of a flea—a spiritualisation of 
the thing!” “He saw this ina vision then?” “PII 

154 


The Heart of the Mystery 


tell you all about it, sir. I called on him one eve- 
ning, and found Blake more than usually excited. 
He told me he had seen a wonderful thing—the 
ghost of a flea! ‘And did you make a drawing of 
him?? I inquired. ‘No, indeed,’ said he, ‘I wish 
I had, but I shall, if he appears again!’ He 
looked earnestly into a corner of the room, and 
then said, ‘Here he is—reach me my things—I 
shall keep my eye on him. There he comes! his 
eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in 
his hand to hold blood, and covered with a scaly 
skin of gold and green’—as he described him so 
he drew him.” 

In a publication called Zodiacal Physiognomy, 
Varley sketched more fully the incident of the flea, 
saying: “This spirit visited [ Blake’s| imagination 
in such a figure as he never anticipated in an insect. 
As I was anxious to make the most correct investi- 
gation in my power, of the truth of these visions, 
on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea, 
I asked him if he could draw for me the re- 
semblance of what he saw: he instantly said, ‘I 
see him now before me.’ I therefore gave him 
paper and a pencil, with which he drew the por- 
trait. . . . I felt convinced by his mode of pro- 

155 


William Blake in This Worid 


ceeding that he had a real image before him, for 
he left off, and began on another part of the paper 
to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the 
Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was pre- 
vented from proceeding with the first sketch, till 
he had closed it. During the time occupied in com-. 
pleting the drawing, the Flea told him that all 
fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men as 
were by nature blood-thirsty to excess, and were 
therefore providentially confined to the size and 
form of insects; otherwise, were he himself, for 
instance, the size of a horse, he would depopulate 
a great portion of the country. He added, that if 
in attempting to leap from one island to another, 
he should fall into the sea, he could swim, and 
should not be lost. This spirit afterwards ap- 
peared to Blake, and afforded him a view of his 
whole figure. . . .” 

The most propitious time for Blake’s “angel- 
visits,” Varley told Cunningham, “was from nine 
at night till five in the morning; and so docile were 
his spiritual sitters, that they appeared at the wish 
of his friends. Sometimes, however, the shape 
which he desired to draw was long in appearing, 
and he sat with his pencil and paper ready and his 
eyes idly roaming in vacancy; all at once the vision 
156 


The Heart of the Mystery 


came upon him, and he began to work like one 
possesst. 

“Fle was requested to draw the likeness of Sir 
William Wallace—the eye of Blake sparkled, for 
he admired heroes. ‘William Wallace!’ he ex- 
claimed, ‘I see him now—there, there. How 
noble he looks—reach me my things!? Having 
drawn for some time, with the same care of hand 
and steadiness of eye, as if a living sitter had been 
before him, Blake stopped suddenly, and said, ‘I 
cannot finish him—Edward the First has stept in 
between him and me.’?” “That’s lucky,” said 
Varley, “for I want the portrait of Edward too.” 
Blake took another sheet of paper, and sketched 
the “features of Plantagenet”; whereupon Edward 
vanished, and Blake finished the head of Wallace. 

To Varley Blake’s visions were all as immedi- 
ately explicable as they were to R. C. Smith, and 
by the same method. He endorsed the Visionary 
Heads with title and hour of creation: “Richard 
Coeur de Lion, drawn from his spectre. W. Blake 
fecit, Oct. 14, 1819, at quarter past twelve, mid- 
night.” “Wat Tyler, by Blake, from his spectre, 
as in the act of striking the tax-gatherer on the 
head, drawn Oct. 30, 1819, 1 hour A.M.” “The 
Man who Built the Pyramids, Oct. 18, 1819, fif- 

157 


William Blake in This World 


teen minutes of 2, Cancer ascending.” The 
Ghost of a Flea, he wrote, “agrees in countenance 
with one class of people under Gemini, which sign 
is the significator of the Flea . . . [and an] ele- 
gant dancing and fencing sign.” Varley was quick 
to explain other visions of Blake by similar hocus- 
pocus. “Sagittarius crossing Taurus,” he muttered. 

Almost as far from the earth as R. C. Smith and 
Varley were a group of young artists who became 
Blake’s disciples in 1824 and 1825. By them he 
came near being canonized on earth, and by him 
in his flights some of them came near being carried 
along. The most important were Edward Calvert, 
Francis Finch, George Richmond, Frederick Tat- 
ham, and Samuel Palmer. To Calvert, come up to 
London on business and told by John Giles, stock- 
broker, of “the divine Blake, who has seen God, sir, 
and talked with angels,” Blake seemed worth neg- 
lecting business for. To Finch he appeared “A 
new kind of man, wholly original, and in all 
things.” To Richmond, who, a boy of sixteen, 
walked home with him across the fields from 
Hampstead, it was “as though he had been walk- 
ing with the prophet Isaiah.” ‘To Tatham he was 
a “oreat man,” with whom no one could converse 
on any subject without gaining “something quite 

158 


The Heart of the Mystery 


as new as noble from his eccentric and elastic 
mind.” ‘To Palmer, who at nineteen first visited 
him in Fountain Court, he appeared “like one of 
the Antique patriarchs, or a dying Michael An- 
gelo,” and his dwelling “the chariot of the sun— 
as it were an island in the midst of the sea—such 
a place is it for primitive grandeur.” His tech- 
nique dominated Richmond’s Abel the Shepherd, 
Calvert’s Christian Ploughing the Last Furrow of 
Life, and, in grotesque absurd imagery, Palmer’s 
Naomi. 

These young artists founded an _ order; 
that is, they made themselves into an order, 
called “The Ancients,” and chose him ‘“Mas- 
ter.” His two rooms in Fountain Court 
became for them “The House of the In- 
terpreter.” For his doctrine of the visionary life 
they all, under the influence of youth, of the 
group, perhaps of slender diet, probably of his sin- 
cerity and intensity, had tolerance. Calvert, 
though least submissive, made only “the most ten- 
der allusions” to Blake’s visions. “I saw nothing 
but sanity,” he declared; “saw nothing mad in his 
conduct, actions, or character.’ Finch, who in 
Palmer’s opinion was in the group the man “with- 
out passion or prejudice, with the calmest judg- 

159 


William Blake in This World 


ment, with the most equable dalance of faculties, 
and those of a very refined order,” was of them 
all “most inclined to believe in Blake’s spiritual 
intercourse.” ‘He was not mad,” said Finch, 
“but perverse and wilful.” Richmond said that 
he had never “known an artist so spiritual, so de- 
voted, so single-minded, or | so] cherishing imag- 
ination.” Tatham gave many pages of his Life 
of Blake to the defence of Blake’s visionary power 
as not of the stuff of Cock Lane ghosts, and as 
justified by its works, “these expressive, these 
sublime, these awful diagrams of an eternal phan- 
tasy.” Palmer fell most completely under Blake’s 
influence. His diary told of “visions . . . excess 

. really dreadful gloom . . . beautiful imagi- 
nations.” “The last 4 or 5 mornings,” it ran, “I 
thank God that He has mercifully taken off the 
load of horror which was wont so cruelly to scare 
my spirits on awakening. . . . All day I could do 
nothing; but at evening-time it was light; and at 
night, such blessed help and inspiration! O Lord 
grant me, I beseech Thee grant, that I may remem- 
ber what Tou only showedst me about my Ruth. 
. . . Soinspired in the morning that I worked on 
the Naomi which had caused me just before such 
dreadful suffering, as confidently and certainly as 

160 








innell 
Really anx 


L 


s to fathom the truth 


10u 


The Heart of the Mystery 


ever did M. Angelo I believe. . . . This day, I 
took out my Artist’s Home, having through a 
change in my visions got displeased with it.” 
Years afterward, when the heady draught of 
Blake’s company had effervesced, and when Pal- 
mer looked back on himself as “the positive and 
eccentric young man who wrote the notes in these 
pages,” he was yet able to write: “I remember 
William Blake in the quiet consistency of his daily 
life, as one of the sanest, if not the most thor- 
oughly sane man I have ever known.” 

In the years during which the Ancients, not yet 
called upon to testify for their Master, were ar- 
dently visiting his house, the House of the Inter- 
preter, in the years during which Smith and Varley 
were making notes on Blake as an astrological 
phenomenon, John Linnell was visiting with him 
the theatres and galleries of London, was seeing 
to it that the rent of the House could be paid. 
Here, after the stars of the astrologers and the 
clouds of the Ancients, was more solid earth. Lin- 
nell was attracted to Blake from his first sight of 
him in 1818, visited with him the Spring 
Gardens Exhibition, the British Gallery, the Water 
Colour Exhibition, Somerset House, the British 
Museum, Hendon, Drury Lane; opened his house 

161 


William Blake in This World 


at Hampstead to Blake’s visits; in fact introduced 
him to Varley, to the young artists who became his 
disciples, and to older ones who became his pa- 
trons; commissioned him to engrave a second set 
of his illustrations to Job; suggested and financed 
the illustrations to Dante, which gave Blake a 
moderate steady income almost on demand; tried 
to arrange for Blake’s removal from Fountain 
Court when that neighborhood seemed unhealthy 
for him, and after Blake’s death befriended Mrs. 
Blake. Not by what he said about him, but by 
what he did with him and for him, Linnell was 
Blake’s stoutest champion. The solid earth here 
was the solid earth of friendly artistic fellowship. 
_ Linnell was an independent, self-supporting 
artist, ten years older than Richmond, Palmer, 
and the rest. He had “resources within himself,” 
and being “confessedly out of touch with the 
peculiar sentiment which was the bond of union” 
of the Ancients, seldom attended their monthly 
meetings, “when at the platonic feast of reason 
and flow of soul only real Greeks from Hackney 
and Lisson Grove were admitted.” Calvert was 
one day at Linnell’s house and was describing one 
of his landscape drawings. “These are God’s 
fields,” said he, in a low, solemn voice to Linnell’s 
162 


The Heart of the Mystery 


daughters. ‘This is God’s brook, these are God’s 
trees, and these are God’s sheep and lambs.” 
“Then why,” asked Linnell, who was sitting near, 
“then why don’t you mark them with a big G?” 

To Linnell Blake’s Visionary Heads were en- 
tertaining, not astrological. Cassibelane, the Brit- 
ish Chief, he said, was fit for the head man at 
Howell and James’s. 

“T soon encountered Blake’s peculiarities,” Lin- 
nell wrote, “and was sometimes taken aback by the 
boldness of his assertions. I never saw anything 
the least like madness. I never opposed him spite- 
fully, as many did. But being really anxious to 
fathom, if possible, the amount of truth that there 
might be in his most startling assertions, I gener- 
ally met with a sufficiently rational explanation in 
the most really friendly and conciliatory tone.” 
Again Linnell said: “There is one thing I must 
mention: I never in all my conversation with him 
could for a moment feel that there was the least 
justice in calling him insane; he could always ex- 
plain his paradoxes satisfactorily when he pleased 
fe still apain he wrote: “Blake was very 
unreserved in his narration to me of all his 
thoughts and actions... he was a_ hearty 
laugher at absurdities.” 

163 


William Blake in This World 


On December 10, 1825, Linnell and Blake took 
dinner at Mrs. Aders’s in Euston Square, and 
there Blake came under the sharp eye of a man not 
likely to canonize him a saint or to find him a 
hearty laugher at absurdities. This was Henry 
Crabb Robinson, Macaulay’s “inspired idiot.” By 
his own diagnosis that indefatigable reporter had 
“no imagination, nor any power beyond that of 
a logical understanding,” but with that power he 
managed to leave a detailed daily Journal from 
1811 to 1867, twenty-eight volumes of Journals 
of Tours, thirty-two of Letters, and four of 
Reminiscences, a mountain in which there is many 
a mouse worth finding. Robinson had his pre- 
conceived notion of Blake. Fifteen years before, 
in 1810, with Malkin’s book at his elbow, he had 
amused himself by writing for a German periodical 
an “account of the insane poet, painter, and en- 
eraver, Blake.” In 1811 he had heard Southey 
hold forth on Blake as “a decided madman,” the 
author of that “perfectly mad poem called Jerusa- 
lem? In 1815 Flaxman had told him that Blake 
had had “a violent dispute with the angels .. . 
and had driven them away.” Robinson said of 
Blake: “I was aware before of the nature of his im- 
pressions.” So at Mrs. Aders’s it was his object, 

164 








Crabb Robinson 
No power beyond that of a logical under- 
standing 


The Heart of the Mystery 


he said, to draw Blake out, to get from him “an 
avowal of his peculiar sentiments.” 

It couldn’t have been an easy evening for Blake. 
“If there is any one here who wishes to say any- 
thing,” once remarked Samuel Rogers, “he had 
better say it at once, for Crabb Robinson is com- 
ing.” Before the evening at Mrs. Aders’s was 
over, Robinson “took occasion” to inquire into 
Blake’s views on atheism, the visionary life, the 
impossibility of supposing an immortal’s being 
created, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the difference 
between good and evil, the question whether there 
is anything absolutely evil in what men do, the 
moral character of Dante in writing his vision— 
was he pure?—the difference between the visions 
of Dante and of Swedenborg, the poetry of 
Wordsworth, the ideas of Plato, Bacon, Locke, 
Newton, and Irving. In this quizzing he was try- 
ing, in his own words, with “‘obvious questions,” 
to connect the “fragmentary sentiments” of Blake, 
to “reconcile” one with another, or to “twist ... 
[a] passage into a sense corresponding with Blake’s 
own theories.” 

It couldn’t have been an easy evening for 
Robinson. The man who planned to reconcile 
Blake’s fragmentary sentiments, to make two and 

165 


William Blake in This World 


two come out four, had a long row to hoe. Blake 
had a way with such hecklers. ‘When opposed by 

. . the superstitious, the crafty, or the proud, 
[he] outraged all common sense and rationality 
by the opinions he advanced,” said Linnell. On 
that “very remarkable and interesting evening” 
of their first meeting Robinson, crafty as he 
meant to be, found Blake “continually” expressing 
“unintelligible sentiments.” Some of them, Rob- 
inson probably thought, outraged all common 
sense and rationality. . “There is no use in educa- 
tion,” Blake hastily broke in on him. “I hold it 
wrong. It is the great sin.” When Robinson 
asked about the moral character of Dante in writ- 
ing his vision—was he pure?—“Pure?” said Blake, 
“Do you think there is any purity in God’s eyes? 
The angels in heaven are no more so than we.” 
Blake “said he had been much pained by reading 
the introduction to the Excursion. It brought on 
a fit of illness.’ (“A bowel complaint which 
nearly killed him,” Robinson, reporting more 
specifically, wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth.) “I 
do not believe that the world is round,” he told 
Robinson. “TI believe it is quite flat.” Robinson 
“objected the circumnavigation,” but they were 

166 


The Heart of the Mystery 


called to dinner at the moment and the reply was 
forever lost. 

When at a later meeting Blake confessed the 
doctrine that “eine Gemeinschaft der Frauen statt 
finden sollte,” the moral character of Robinson in 
writing his diary was so pure that in reporting this 
confession he resorted to the German. Blake also 
“asserted that he had committed many murders, 
that reason is the only evil or sin, and that careless, 
gay people are better than those who think.” Is 
it not possible that he was being careless and gay at 
Robinson’s expense when he told Mrs. Aders that 
he and Robinson “were nearly of an opinion”? 
“Yet,” said Robinson, “I have practised no decep- 
tion intentionally.” 

For all that Robinson came to Mrs. Aders’s on 
the tenth of December with such preconceived no- 
tions that I cannot subscribe to Geoffrey Keynes’s 
characterization of him as “an unprejudiced ob- 
server” of Blake, for all that it is hard to read be- 
tween the lines of a dialogue between a meteor 
and a pedestrian reported in the diary of the 
pedestrian, I would not willingly part with Rob- 
inson’s diary. He practised no deception intention- 
ally. His diary is worth ten times its length in 
second-hand biography, and gives the most ex- 

167 


William Blake in This World 


tensive first-hand report in existence of Blake’s 
manner and words. 

At Mrs. Aders’s, despite the outrageous and 
inconsistent answers he got, Robinson’s fresh im- 
pressions of Blake were favourable. “He has a 
most interesting appearance,” he reported. “He 
is now old—pale with a Socratic countenance, and 
an expression of great sweetness, but bordering on 
weakness—except when his features are animated 
by expression, and then he has an air of inspira- 
tion about him.” ‘The tone and manner are in- 
communicable. There is a natural sweetness and 
gentility about Blake which are delightful. And 
when he is not referring to his Visions, he talks 
sensibly and acutely.” He summarized Blake’s 
effect on him that night by saying: “I feel great 
admiration and respect for him—he is certainly a 
most amiable man—a good creature. . . .” 

One week after December tenth Robinson made 
in the morning “a short call” on Blake in 
Fountain Court. The room which had seemed 
to Palmer “an island in the midst of the 
sea—such a place is it for primitive grandeur”— 
seemed to Robinson “squalid,” but in spite of the 
“dirt,” he “might say filth,’ Robinson felt at- 
tracted by “an air of natural gentility . .. dif- 

168 


The Heart of the Mystery 


fused over” Blake and “a good expression of coun- 
tenance” in Mrs. Blake, and. decided that he would 
“have a pleasure in calling on and conversing 
with these worthy people.” Robinson at the same 
time threw up the sponge as far as understanding 
Blake was concerned. “I fear I shall not make 
any progress in ascertaining his opinions and feel- 
ings—that there being really no system or connec- 
tion in his mind, all his future conversation will 
be but varieties of wildness and incongruity.” 
Sure enough, in later visits, he heard “the same 
half-crazy crotchets . . . the eternal repetition 
of what must in time become tiresome . . . a rep- 
etition of his former talk . . . the same round 
of extravagant and mad doctrines . . . his wild 
rambling way of talk.”? Robinson was accordingly 
not “anxious to be frequent” in his visits to Blake. 

But, carrying out his resolution, made at their 
first meeting, to set down without method all he 
could “recollect of the conversation of this re- 
markable man,” Robinson left a series of specific 
reports of remarks by Blake. 

“Blake,” he said, “spoke of his paintings as 
being what he had seen in his visions.” “And 
when he said my visions, it was in the ordinary un- 
emphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters 

169 


William Blake in This World 


that every one understands and cares nothing 
about. In the same tone he said repeatedly, the 
‘Spirit told me.’ ” 

Robinson once took occasion to say,,“You use 
the same word as Socrates used. What resem- 
blance do you suppose is there between your spirit 
and the spirit of Socrates?” ‘The same as between 
our countenances.” Blake paused “and added 
—T was Socrates. And then, as if cor- 
recting himself, ‘A sort of brother. I must 
have had conversations with him. So I had with 
Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of 
having been with both of them.’?” “He spoke 
with seeming complacency of himself—said he 
acted by command. The spirit said to him, ‘Blake, 
be an artist and nothing else.? In this there is 
felicity. His eye glistened while he spoke of the 
joy of devoting himself solely to divine art. ‘Art 
is inspiration. When Michael Angelo or Raphael 
or Mr. Flaxman does any of his fine things, he 
does them in the spirit. . . . I should be sorry 
if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural 
glory a man has is so much detracted from his 
spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. 
I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. 
I am quite happy.’ . . . Though he spoke of his 

170 


The Heart of the Mystery 


happiness, he spoke of past sufferings, and of 
sufferings as necessary. ‘There is suffering in 
heaven, for where there is the capacity of enjoy- 
ment, there is the capacity of pain.’ He reverted 
soon to his favourite expression, My Visions. ‘I 
saw Milton in imagination, and he told me to 
beware of being misled by his Paradise Lost. In 
particular he wished me to show the falsehood of 
his doctrine that the pleasures of sex arose from 
the fall. The fall could not produce any pleas- 
ure... . ‘1 have had much intercourse with 
Voltaire.’ ” 

Robinson asked in what language Voltaire spoke 
and Blake gave “an ingenious answer.” ‘To my 
sensation it was English. It was like the touch of 
a musical key. He touched it probably French, 
but to my ear it became English.” 

On February 2, 1827, Gotzenberger, a young 
painter from Germany, called on Robinson, went 
with him to see Blake, and looked over Blake’s 
illustrations to Dante. He “seemed highly grati- 
fied by the designs, and Mrs. Aders says G6tzen- 
berger considers Blake as the first and Flaxman 
as the second man he had seen in England,” re- 
ported Robinson. On his return to Germany 
Gotzenberger said, “I saw in England many men 

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William Blake in This World 


of talents, but only three men of genius, Coleridge, 
Flaxman and Blake, and of these Blake was the 
preatest:7 

Robinson, though he was not frequent in his 
visits, continued to call on and converse with Blake 
and Mrs. Blake until Blake’s death. Thereafter, 
on January 8, 1828, he “Walked with Field to 
Mrs. Blake,” and found “the poor old lady . . . 
more affected” than he had expected at the sight of 
him. “A few of her husband’s works are all her 
property.” He bought two prints for five guineas 
and asked Mrs. Blake to “look out some engrav- 
ings” for him. 

By the time of Robinson’s call on Mrs. Blake, 
the memory of Blake was already falling among 
biographers. John Thomas Smith was at work on 
Nollekens and his Times: comprehending a Life 
of that celebrated Sculptor; and Memoirs of 
several contemporary Artists, from the time of 
Roubiliac, Hogarth, and Reynolds. . . . He had 
known Blake since the days in Mrs. Mathew’s 
parlour, forty-five years before, and he had his 
Biographical Sketch of Blake ready for the second 
volume of his work, published in 1828. Allan 
Cunningham was at work on Lives of the Most 
Eminent British Painters; Sculptors, and Archi- 

172 


The Heart of the Mystery 


tects. “I know Blake’s character, for I knew the 
man,” he wrote to Linnell. He had his Life of 
Blake ready for his second volume, published in 
1830. Cunningham got help particularly from 
Varley, and from Smith. 

Smith collected more of the whole story of 
Blake than any one else before Gilchrist. He had 
a flair for anecdote, but he was embarrassed in the 
company of Blake’s thoughts. It was he who took 
unspeakable pleasure in assuring his readers that 
though Blake “did not for the last forty years 
attend any place of Divine worship, yet he was 
not a Freethinker.”” He considered the lines be- 
ginning, 

For a tear is an intellectual thing; 


“fa convincing proof how highly [Blake] rever- 
enced the Almighty.” He dodged any extensive 
discussion of Blake’s spiritual experience, but 
slipped in an anecdote of the supernatural source 
of Blake’s method of printing. “I should have 
stated,” he said casually, “that Blake was super- 
eminently endowed with the power of disuniting 
all other thoughts from his mind, whenever he 
wished to indulge in thinking of any particular 
subject; and so firmly did he believe, by this ab- 
173 


William Blake in This World 


stracting power, that the objects of his compositions 
were before him in his mind’s eye, that he fre- 
quently believed them to be speaking to him. 
. . . After deeply perplexing himself as to the 
mode of accomplishing the publication of his illus- 
trated songs, without their being subject to the ex- 
pense of letterpress, his brother Robert stood be- 
fore him in one of his visionary imaginations, and 
so decidedly directed him in the way in which he 
ought to proceed, that he immediately followed his 
advice, by writing his poetry and drawing his 
marginal subjects of embellishments in outline 
upon the copper-plate with an impervious liquid, 
and then eating the plain parts or lights away with 
aqua-fortis considerably below them, so that the 
outlines were left as a stereotype. The plates in 
this state were then printed in any tint that he 
wished, to enable him or Mrs. Blake to colour the 
marginal figures up by hand in imitation of draw- 
ings.” 

Smith’s anecdote of Robert’s visit has grown 
more and more circumstantial with retelling and 
will probably not disappear from lives of Blake, 
though it is now observed that in Av Island in the 
Moon, written perhaps in 1784, three years before 

174 


The Heart of the Mystery 


Robert’s death, Blake foreshadowed a scheme of 
illuminated printing. Moreover, in 1784, George 
Cumberland of Bristol, soon to be Blake’s friend, 
had in mind the details of a method of “etching 
words instead of landscapes.” 

If Smith in general fought shy of Blake’s vision- 
ary life, Allan Cunningham, who thought he knew 
Blake’s character because he knew the man, was 
fascinated by it. It was the fascination of oppo- 
sites. Cunningham was the “pleasant Natur- 
mensch,” the “solid Dumfries stonemason” whose 
“stalwart healthy figure and ways”? won Carlyle’s 
respect. He was capable of thinking that Blake 
married Catherine because she learned “to despise 
gaudy dresses, costly meals, pleasant company and 
agreeable invitations ... [and] had good do- 
mestic qualities.” Cunningham had about him 
fa tag of rusticity to the last”? and was sensitive 
about Blake’s figures: “the serious and the pious 
were not prepared to admire shapes trembling in 
nudity.” A naked angel “alarmed . . . and 
made maids and matrons retire behind their fans.” 

He had a Scotch explanation of why Blake was 
fey. Blake “earned a little fame, but no money.” 
This “had a visible influence upon his mind. He 

BGS 


William Blake in This World 


became more seriously thoughtful, avoided the 
company of men, and lived in the manner of a 
hermit, in that vast wilderness, London. Necessity 
made him frugal, and honesty and independence 
prescribed plain clothes, homely fare, and a cheap 
habitation. He was thus compelled more than 
ever to retire to worlds of his own creating, and 
seek solace in visions of paradise for the joys which 
the earth denied him. By frequent indulgence 
in these imaginings, he gradually began to believe 
in the reality of what dreaming fancy painted. 
. . . During the day he was a man of sagacity and 
sense, who handled his graver wisely, and con- 
versed in a wholesome and pleasant manner; in the 
evening, when he had done his prescribed task, he 
gave a loose to his imagination.” 

Having thus put his finger on a substantial basis 
—money, money!—for Blake’s insubstantial vi- 
sions, Cunningham was not afraid to be enter- 
tained at his “most amusing wildness.” He 
repeated the story of Robert; gave a long account 
of the “majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and 
superior to the common height of men” with whom 
Blake walked on the seashore at Felpham; quoted 
visionary passages from such Felpham letters of 
Blake as he saw; was vastly amused at the “wild 

176 


The Heart of the Mystery 


performance” of the Descriptive Catalogue with 
Titian, Correggio, and Rubens playing the réle 
of demons; and gave Varley’s account of the 
Visionary Heads verbatim. He included two new 
anecdotes from sources no more definite than a 
“lady” and “a friend.” ‘Did you ever see a 
fairy’s funeral, madam?’ [Blake] once said to a 
lady, who happened to sit by him in company. 
“Never, sir!’ was the answer. ‘I have,’ said Blake, 
‘but not before last night. I was walking alone 
in my garden, there was great stillness among the 
branches and flowers and more than a common 
sweetness in the air; I heard a low and pleasant 
sound, and J knew not whence it came. At last I 
saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and under- 
neath I saw a procession of creatures of the size 
and colour of green and grey grasshoppers, bear- 
ing a body laid out on a rose leaf, which they 
buried with songs, and then disappeared. It was 
a fairy funeral’ ” 

“Another friend, on whose veracity I have the 
fullest dependence,” wrote Cunningham, “called 
one evening on Blake, and found him sitting with 
a pencil and a panel, drawing a portrait with all the 
seeming anxiety of a man who is conscious that he 
has got a fastidious sitter; he looked and drew, 

Lai 


William Blake in This World 


and drew and looked, yet no living soul was 
visible. ‘Disturb me not,’ said he, in a whisper, 
‘I have one sitting to me.’ ‘Sitting to you!’ ex- 
claimed his astonished visitor, ‘where is he and 
what is he?—I see no one.’ ‘But I see him, sir,’ 
answered Blake haughtily; ‘there he is, his name is 
Lot—you may read of him in the Scripture. He 
is sitting for his portrait.’ ” 

Three years after the Life of Blake, in The 
Cabinet Gallery of Pictures, Cunningham said, 
with a flourish and probably apocryphally, that 
“Blake, who always saw in fancy every form he 
drew, believed that angels descended to painters 
of old and sat for their portraits.” ‘When he him- 
self sat to Phillips for that fine portrait so beauti- 
fully engraved by Schiavonetti; the painter . 
in order to attain the most unaffected attitude, and 
the most poetic expression, engaged his sitter in a 
conversation concerning the sublime in art. ‘We 
hear much,’ said Phillips, ‘of the grandeur of 
Michael Angelo; from the engravings, I should 
say he has been overrated; he could not paint an 
angel so well as Raphael.’ ‘He has not been over- 
rated, Sir,? said Blake, ‘and he could paint an 
_ angel better than Raphael.’ ‘Well, but,’ said the 
other, ‘you never saw any of the paintings of 


178 








Blake by Phillips 
I closed the book and cried, “Aye! Who 


can paint an angel?” 


The Heart of the Mystery 


Michael Angelo; and perhaps speak from the opin- 
ions of others; your friends may have deceived 
you.’ ‘I never saw any of the paintings of Michael 
Angelo,’ replied Blake, ‘but I speak from the 
opinion of a friend who could not be mistaken.’ 
‘A valuable friend, truly,’ said Phillips, ‘and who 
may he be, I pray?? ‘The archangel Gabriel, 
Sir,” answered Blake. ‘A good authority surely, 
but you know evil spirits love to assume the looks 
of good ones; and this may have been done to 
mislead you.’ ‘Well now, Sir,’ said Blake, ‘this is 
really singular; such were my own suspicions; but 
they were soon removed—I will tell you how. I 
was one day reading Young’s Night Thoughts, 
and when I came to that passage which asks, ““Who 
can paint an angel?” I closed the book and cried, 
“Aye! who can paint an angel?” A voice in the 
room answered, “Michael Angelo could.” “And 
how do you know?” I said, looking round me, but 
I saw nothing save a greater light than usual. “I 
know,” said the voice, “for I sat to him: I am 
the archangel Gabriel.” “Oho!” I answered, 
“you are, are you? I must have better assurance 
than that of a wandering voice; you may be an 
evil spirit—there are such in the land.” “You 
shall have good assurance,” said the voice. “Can 
179 


William Blake in This World 


an evil spirit do this?” I looked whence the 
voice came, and was then aware of a shining shape, 
with bright wings, who diffused much light. As 
I looked, the shape dilated more and more; he 
waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he 
ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun and, 
beckoning to me, moved the universe. An angel 
of evil could not have done that—it was the arch- 
angel Gabriel.’ The painter marvelled much at 
this wild story, but he caught from Blake’s looks 
as he related it that rapt poetic expression which 
has rendered his portrait one of the finest of the 
English school.” 

In spite of such stories as this of the archangel, 
in spite of the interest in Blake of the astrologers, 
of the young painters and disciples, of the steady- 
going friend, of the indefatigable reporter, and 
of the professional biographers, he remained in- 
conspicuous in the intellectual world of England, 
little more than a voice, the voice of his earliest 
poems, and a rumour, the rumour of his visions. 
“None,” noted E. H. Coleridge, “appear to have 
reflected that Blake had gone back to nature a 
while before either Wordsworth or Coleridge had 
turned their steps in that direction.” Still, though 
he lived so quietly in “the vast wilderness of Lon- 

180 


The Heart of the Mystery 


don,” Southey, Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt, Ed- 
ward Fitzgerald, Bulwer-Lytton, and Landor, all 
made at least passing comment on him. 

“Coleridge,” reported Robinson to Dorothy 
Wordsworth in 1826, “has visited Blake and I am 
told talks finely about him.” “Blake and Cole- 
ridge, when in company,” said an article in the 
London University Magazine in 1830, “seemed 
like congenial beings of another sphere, breathing 
for a while on our earth.” - 

_ Southey on July 24, 1811, was in “a large 
party” at “C. Lamb’s.” It was there that Robin- 
son heard Southey call Blake a decided madman. 
“Southey had been with Blake and admired both 
his designs and his poetic talents. . . . Blake, he 
says, spoke of his visions with the diffidence that 
is usual with such people, and did not seem to ex- 
pect that he should be believed.” 

Wordsworth told Robinson in 1812 that he “re- 
garded Blake as having in him the elements of 
poetry much more than either Byron or Scott.” 
“There is no doubt this poor man was mad,” said 
Wordsworth, “but there is something in the mad- 
ness of this man which interests me more than the 
sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.” 

In his letter to Dorothy Wordsworth in 1826 

181 


William Blake in This World 


Robinson said of Blake: “There is something so 
delightful about the Man. . . that I have not 
scrupled promising introducing him and Mr. 
Wordsworth together. He expressed his thanks 
strongly, saying, ‘Youdo me honour. Mr. Words- 
worth isa great man. Besides he may convince me 
I am wrong about him. I have been wrong be- 
fore now.’” The introduction promised by Rob- 
inson was, however, not given. 

Charles Lamb, according to Robinson, was “‘de- 
lighted” in 1810 with a copy of Blake’s Catalogue, 
“preferred greatly” Blake’s to Stothard’s picture 
of the Canterbury Pilgrims “and declared that 
Blake’s description was the finest criticism he had 
ever read of Chaucer’s poem.” On May 15, 
1824, Lamb wrote to his Quaker friend, Bernard 
Barton, concerning Blake. The Chimney Sweeper 
and other lines by Blake “communicated” to an 
anthology were “the flower of the set.” Blake’s 
poems, Lamb said, “have been sold hitherto only 
in manuscript. I never read them; but a friend 
at my desire procured the ‘Sweep Song.’ There 
is one to a tiger, which I have heard recited, begin- 
ning— 

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright 
Thro’ the deserts of the night, 
182 


The Heart of the Mystery 


which is glorious, but alas! I have not the book; 
for the man is flown, whither I know not—to 
Hades or a Mad House. But I must look on him 
as one of the most extraordinary persons of the 
ape.” 

Hazlitt in 1826 in an essay, On the Old Age of 
Artists, grouped Blake with Varley and others 
who make “voluntary excursions into the regions 
of the preternatural, pass their time between 
sleeping and waking, and whose ideas are like 
a stormy night, with the clouds driven rapidly 
across, and the blue sky and stars gleaming be- 
tween.” When in 1827 Hazlitt heard some of 
Blake’s poems read he “was much struck and ex- 
pressed himself with his usual strength and singu- 
larity. ‘They are beautiful,’ he said, ‘and only 
too deep for the vulgar. As to God, a worm is as 
worthy as any other object, all alike being to him 
indifferent; so to Blake the chimney-sweeper, etc. 
He is ruined by vain struggles to get rid of 
what presses on his brain; he attempts impossi- 
bilities.’ ” 

In 1833 Edward Fitzgerald said that Blake 
‘Cwas quite mad, but of a madness that was really 
the elements of great genius ill-sorted.” “To 
me,” he went on, “there is particular interest in 

183 


William Blake in This World 


this man’s writing and drawing, from the strange- 
ness of the constitution of his mind.” 

In 1835 Bulwer-Lytton said of Blake: “With 
what a hearty faith he believed in his faculty of 
seeing spirits and conversing with the dead! And 
what a delightful vein of madness it was—with 
what exquisite verses it inspired him! ... and 
what engravings!” 

Landor in 1837 “protested that Blake had been 
Wordsworth’s prototype, and wished they could 
have divided his madness between them; for that 
some accession of it in the one case, and some 
diminution of it in the other, would very greatly 
have improved both.” In a manuscript notebook 
Landor wrote: “Blake: Never did a braver or a 
better man carry the sword of justice.” 

Following the scattered comments of these 
literary men the ironic silence which H. G. Wells 
describes as falling after long argument fell across 
the discussion as to Blake’s powers and sanity 
and lasted until Gilchrist’s Life of Blake in 1863 
awakened new controversy. The comments, 
ending in 1837, formed the last arch in the 
bridge of contemporary evidence as to Blake and 
his art and his visions. They completed the testi- 
mony of the spectators on the earth. 

184 


The Heart of the Mystery 


These spectators on the earth, from Merlinus 
Anglicanus, Junior, and his Metropolitan Society 
of Occult Philosophers to Bulwer-Lytton and 
Landor, were second in range only to the 
spectators in the sky, the Ghost of a Flea and 
Milton, the “naked heroes in the Welch Moun- 
tains” and Socrates. Their varied testimony, 
in which they appeared credulous, or young 
and impressionable, or friendly and devoted, or 
curious, or professionally and remotely interested, 
threw a light oblique but illuminating on Blake. 
There was something of him in what each of 
them saw in him. He was the painter of visionary 
heads who brought rich grist to Smith and Varley’s 
mill of astrology. He was the new kind of man, 
wholly original and in all things, who was a sort of 
prophet, and a dying Michael Angelo, an inter- 
preter of art and life, tothe Ancients. He was the 
unreserved companion and the hearty laugher 
at absurdities who threaded London’s galleries 
and Hampstead’s paths with Linnell. He was the 
good creature, old, pale, with a Socratic coun- 
tenance, a natural sweetness and gentility, an air 
of inspiration about him when his features were 
animated, with whom it gave Robinson pleasure 
to converse. He was the artist giving a loose to 

185 


William Blake in This World 


his imagination by whose fate Scotch Allan 
Cunningham was touched. He was the poet in 
whose voice and in the rumour of whose madness 
Wordsworth and Lamb, Fitzgerald and Bulwer- 
Lytton and Landor, could find interest. 

Since he was, as his own words showed, a man 
dominated by an organ of vision that in him had 
a double function as the organ of spiritualism and 
as the organ of the artistic process, it was natural 
that that double power in him should govern the 
interest taken in him by others. As a spiritualist 
he interested R. C. Smith and Varley; as an artist 
he interested the Ancients, Linnell, J. T. Smith, 
and the poets; as a spiritualist and an artist 
he interested Robinson and Cunningham. Yet 
to Varley he was an artist as well as a spiritu- 
alist; to the Ancients and the poets he was a spiritu- 
alist as well as an artist; to Linnell he was a per- 
sonal friend as well as an artist and a spiritualist. 

It was inevitable that Blake’s visionary power 
should, in rumour and report, be magnified. In 
general the picturesqueness of his visions provoked 
exaggeration. More specifically Blake’s habit 
“when opposed,” of outraging “all common sense 
and rationality by the opinions he advanced,” in- 
sured exaggeration. There is corroboration that 

186 


The Heart of the Mystery 


this was his habit. He spoke to many, Linnell 
said, “so that hearing they might not hear.” 
“Blake would say outrageous things to people,” 
said Richmond, “answering a fool according to his 
folly, to those who did not and never would under- 
stand him or his works.” ‘He was possessed,” 
wrote Tatham, “of a peculiar obstinacy, that always 
bristled up when he was either unnecessarily 
opposed or invited out to show like a lion or a 
bear. Many anecdotes could be related in which 
there is sufficient evidence to prove that many of 
his eccentric speeches were thrown forth more as 
a piece of sarcasm upon the inquirer than from his 
real opinion. If he thought a question were put 
merely for a desire to learn, no man could give 
advice more reasonably and more kindly; but if 
that same question were put for idle curiosity, he 
retaliated by such an eccentric answer as left the 
inquirer more afield than ever. He then made an 
enigma of a plain question—hence arose many 
vague reports of his oddities.” “Materialism was 
his abhorrence,” said Palmer, “and if some un- 
happy man called in question the world of spirits, 
he would answer him ‘according to his folly,’ by 
putting forth his own views in their most ex- 
travagant and startling aspect. This might amuse 
187 


William Blake in This World 


those who were in the secret, but it left his oppo- 
nent angry and bewildered.” “Blake wrote often,” 
Palmer said again, “in anger and rhetorically; 
just as we might speak if some pretender to Chris- 
tianity whom we knew to be hypocritical, were 
canting to us in a pharisaical way. We might say, 
‘If this is your Heaven, give me Hell.’? We might 
say this in temper, but without in the least mean- 
ing that that was our deliberate preference. .. . 
This is the clue to much of Blake’s paradox, and 
often it carries its own explanation with it... . 
When irritated by the exclusively scientific talk at 
a friend’s house, a talk turning on the vastness of 
space, [he] cried out: ‘It is false, I walked the 
other evening to the end of the heath, and touches 
the sky with my finger.’ ” 

Blake’s habitual peculiar obstinacy is one reason 
why the Devil can quote him almost as aptly as he 
can quote Scripture. 

The exaggeration inevitable from the pic- 
turesqueness of his visions and the quality of 
his speech made the report of his madness grow 
emphatic in the ratio of the distance of the re- 
porter from Blake, Stothard, Flaxman, Fuselli, 
Cumberland, Butts, who knew him longest, left 
no report of him as mad. Hayley, near whom he 

188 


\ 


The Heart of the Mystery 


lived for three years, called him “my gentle vision- 
ary.” Richmond, Tatham, Calvert, Finch, his 
disciples, “saw nothing but sanity.” Palmer and 
Linnell, his most intimate friends at the end of 
his life, vigorously repudiated down into another 
generation the “idle stories” of his lunacy. But 
the man of logical understanding who believed 
Blake mad before he met him began his report of 
the meeting: “Shall I call him Artist—or Genius 
—or Mystic—or Madman?” Blake’s enemies on 
the Examiner called him “a harmless lunatic.” 
Wordsworth and Lamb, who did not know him, 
but who heard of him from the already convinced 
Robinson, felt no doubt that the poor man was 
mad. 

And yet, and yet, though the exaggeration of 
rumour can be checked, though the testimony of 
the spectators on the earth can be marshalled in 
favour of Blake’s sanity, the spectators in the sky 
remain. They were real to Blake. If to go 
through the great dance of life with a “continued 
vision” of their presence is to be mad, Blake was 
mad. 

His was a madness which interested Words- 
worth more than the sanity of Lord Byron and 
Walter Scott. His was a madness which, into the 

189 


William Blake in This World 


twentieth century, has continued to interest men, 
Mr. William Rose Benét wrote in 1916: 


Blake, they say, was mad; and Space’s Pandora-box 

Loosed its secrets upon him, devils—and angels, indeed! 

I, they say, am sane; but no key of mine unlocks 

One lock of one gate where through Heaven’s glory is 
freed 

And I hark and I hold my breath daylong, yearlong, 

Out of comfort and easy dreaming evermore starting 
awake, 

Yearning beyond all sanity for some echo of that song 

Of songs, that was sung to the soul of the madman, 
Blake. 


It is possible, in Mr. Benét’s mood, to be happy 
that English literature has had, as well as its 
Rasselas, its Hamlet, as well as its Alexander Pope, 
its William Blake, and that he, like Hamlet, 
might say: 

“Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing 
you make of me! You would play upon me, you 
would seem to know my stops; you would pluck 
out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me 
from my lowest note to the top of my compass: 
and there is much music, excellent voice, in this 
little organ; yet cannot you make it speak.” 

190 


XI 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in 
Paradise 


¥ HE man is flown, whither I know not—to 


Hades or a Mad House,” wrote Charles 
Lamb of Blake in 1824, when Blake was in 3 
Fountain Court, just off the Strand towards the 
Thames. 

“The two most celebrated inmates of Bedlam 
Hospital,” said an article in the Revue Britannique 
for July, 1833, “are the incendiary Martin, and 
Blake called the Seer.’ Just where Blake was 
actually when the article was first written it 
is hard to say, because it is hard to say when 
the article was first written, but he was at 17 
South Molton Street or at 3 Fountain Court or 
in Bunhill Fields Cemetery. 

The Revue Britannique published a “choice of 
articles, translated from the best periodical writ- 
ings of Great Britain.” From what periodical, if 
any, it chose its article, The London Insane 
Asylum, has not been learned. The author of the 

191 


William Blake in This World 


article said that “a few years before” he had visited 
Bedlam Hospital and had called on Blake in a 
cell there. He found him “a large pale man, an 
eloquent talker,” very ready to discuss his visions. 
In their reality, said the writer in the Revue, 
Blake believed firmly, profoundly; he conversed 
with Michael Angelo; he chatted with Moses; 
he made himself the painter of  spectres; 
Edward III was one of his most frequent sitters. 
“At what time do your illustrious dead visit you?” 
asked the anonymous author. ‘At one o’clock in 
the morning,” was the answer. After a long in- 
terview, the other details of which might, as eas- 
ily as these, have been lifted from Varley’s account 
of the Visionary Heads published in Cunningham’s 
Life of Blake in 1830, the writer of the article left 
“this man, against whom no reproach could be 
brought, and to whom talent as an engraver and a 
designer was not lacking.” 

The account of Blake’s presence in a Bedlam 
cell, when it got back to England, was dismissed 
by Linnell as “idle stuff? and “lies”; and 
was given “a most unqualified contradiction” by © 
Palmer. The author was “more deluded than 
Blake,” said Richmond. The records of the Royal 
Hospital for the Insane covering the years 1815 to 

192 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


1835 were searched without result for any trace 
of Blake. 

Yet Geoffrey Keynes, the most recent and most 
painstaking bibliographer of Blake, hesitates to 
rule the charge entirely out of court. While he 
calls it “probably a fabrication,” he feels that it 
“cannot lightly be passed over,” and that it has a 
bearing on a period “of more complete isolation” 
to which Blake “‘seems to have retired” about 1809, 
and “which lasted until... 1818.” “Of the 
incidents of the intervening nine years,” Mr. 
Keynes goes on, “almost no record now exists.” 
In his characterization of the years from 1809 to 
1818 as years of isolation of which almost no rec- 
ord now exists, Keynes is following the habit of 
biographers of Blake, who find here a convenient 
division cutting off the London struggles from the 
Jast years of Blake. These were “years of ob- 
scurity,” says Sampson. Of them Gilchrist says 
that he found “little or no remaining trace.” ‘For 
something near ten years,” says Selincourt, Blake 
“sinks into an almost unrelieved obscurity.” 
“Nothing is known of Blake’s life between 1809 

. and 1818,” says Symons. ‘We can account 
for every year of his life, except for the period 
between 1811 and 1817,” says Damon, 

193 


William Blake in This World 


Still, if the minute particulars are laboured well, 
there exists a record of Blake in the years from 
1809 to 1818 which is, I believe, sufficiently de- 
tailed for the establishment of a reasonable alibi 
as to the Bedlam charge and for the relief to a 
considerable extent of the obscurity into which 
Blake is said in these years to have sunk. 

One document in particular, covering the years 
from 1810 to 1816, takes the position directly at 
its key point. “Another person with whom I 
was intimate,” wrote Seymour Kirkup* in 1870, 
“is ... W. Blake. I was much with him from 
1810 to 1816, when I came abroad. . . . I might 
have learned much from him. I was then a 
student of the Royal Academy in the antique 
school, where I gained a medal, and thought more 
of form than anything else. I was by nature a 
lover of colour, and my beau ideal was the union 
of Phidias and Titian. Blake was the determined 
enemy of colourists, and his drawing was not very 
academical. His high qualities I did not prize at 
that time; besides, I thought him mad. I do not 
think so now. I never suspected him of imposture. 
His manner was too honest for that. He was very 
kind to me, though very positive in his opinions, 


1 Reid’s Life of Richard Monckton Milnes. 
] 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


with which I never agreed. His excellent old wife 
was a sincere believer in all his visions. She told 
me seriously one day, ‘I have very little of Mr. 
Blake’s company, he is always in Paradise.’ She 
prepared his colours, and was as good as a servant. 
He had no other. It was Mr. Butts who intro- 
duced me to him. I was a school-fellow of his 
son’s, whom he sent to Blake to learn engraving, 
which was his original art.” 

To the antique school where Kirkup was a 
pupil Blake came in 1815 or 1816 for the purpose 
of making a drawing from the cast of the Laocoén 
for an article on sculpture, on the illustrations for 
which he was then working. It was Tatham who » 
said that Fuseli greeted Blake with the statement 
that the students of the antique school ought to 
come to learn of him, not he of them. “Blake 
took his place with the students,” went on Tatham, 
“and exulted over his work like a young disciple; 
meeting his old friend Fuseli’s congratulations 
and kind remarks with cheerful, simple joy.” 

At a period which, like that of the visit to the 
antique school, cuts sharply into the years of ob- 
scurity, Blake visited the bibliographer, Thomas 
Dibdin. “It was during the progress of working 
on my Decameron that I received visits from two 

195. 


William Blake in This World 


Artists . . . Northcote and Blake,” wrote Dibdin 
in his Reminiscences. The time of his work on 
the Decameron was “From close of year 1815 
to summer of 1817.” Blake, Dibdin said, 
was “pupil of no Master, but a most extraordinary 
artist in his own particular element: although I 
believe he professed to have been a pupil of Flax- 
man and Fuseli. . . . I soon found the amiable 
but illusory Blake far beyond my ken or sight. 
In an instant he was in his ‘third heaven’—flapped 
by the wings of seraphs, such as his own genius 
only could shape, and his own pencil embody. 
The immediate subject of our discussion—and for 
which he professed to have in some measure visited 
me—was ‘the minor poems of Milton.? Never 
were such dreamings poured forth as were poured 
forth by my original visitor:—his stature mean, 
his head big and round, his forehead broad and 
high, his eyes blue, large, and lambent—such as 
my friend Mr. Phillips has represented him upon 
his imperishable canvas. ‘What think you, Mr. 
Blake, of Fuseli’s Lycidas—asleep, beneath the 
opening eyelids of the morn?’ ‘I don’t remember 
it.’ ‘Pray see it and examine it carefully... .. I 
learnt afterwards that my Visitor had seen it—but 
thought it ‘too tame.’ . . . I told Mr. Blake that 
196 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


our common friend, Mr. Masquerier, had induced 
me to purchase his ‘Songs of Innocence,’ and that 
I had no disposition to repent my bargain.” 

Echoes of Blake had been reaching Henry Crabb 
Robinson between 1809 and 1818. It was on 
July 24, 1811, that Robinson was late at Charles 
Lamb’s and heard Southey say that he had been 
with Blake and had been shown Jerusalem. It 
was on January 30, 1815, that Robinson went to 
Flaxman’s after dinner and was told by Flaxman 
that Sharp, the engraver, had endeavoured to 
make a convert of Blake to Joanna Southcott, and 
that, in Flaxman’s opinion, such men as Blake 
were not fond of playing second fiddle. 

On December 31, 1815, William Paulet Carey, 
art critic and art dealer, gave, in a critical descrip- 
tion of West’s Death on the Pale Horse, high and 
lengthy praise to Blake’s “noble series of designs” 
for Blair’s Grave, and said of Blake: “I never had 
the good fortune to see him, and so entire is the 
uncertainty, in which he is involved, that after 
many inquiries, I meet with some doubt whether 
he is still in existence. But I have accidentally 
learned, from a Lady, since I commenced these re- 
marks, that he is certainly now a resident in Lon- 
don. I have, however, heard enough to warrant 

197 


William Blake in This World 


my belief that his professional encouragement 
has been very limited, compared with his powers.” 

In the same year in which Carey wrote these 
remarks, William Ensom, engraver, was awarded 
the silver medal of the Royal Society of Arts fora 
pen-and-ink portrait of William Blake. 

In addition to these specific external references 
to Blake between 1809 and 1818, details of his 
work as artist and author during that period may 
be assembled. In 1810 he wrote in the Rossetti 
Manuscript, “Advertisements to Blakes Canter- 
bury Pilgrims from Chaucer containing anecdotes 
of artists”? On October 8, 1810, he published his 
engraving, the Canterbury Pilgrims. In 1810 he 
wrote in the Rossetti Manuscript a description of 
his painting, The Last Judgement, entitled: For 
the year 1810.. Additions to Blake’s Catalogue of 
Pictures 8c. About 1810 he wrote The Everlast- 
ing Gospel. About 1810 he reissued the Gates 
of Paradise (For the Sexes), with Prologue, Epi- 
logue, and Keys of the Gates. In 1811 he painted 
The Judgement of Paris and, probably in the same 
year, made his engraving of Earl Spenser, after 
Phillips. In 1812 he engraved the frontispiece for 
a small reprint of his Chaucer’s Canterbury Pil- 
grims; reprinted in pamphlet form, with a preface 

198 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


referring to “the genius and fancy of that cele- 
brated man, Mr. Blake,” his Descriptive Cata- 
logue, calling it The Prologue and Characters of 
Chaucer’s Pilgrims; and dated and signed a water 
colour drawing, Philoctetes and Neoptolemos at 
Lemnos. In 1813 he engraved The Chaining of 
Orc, also possibly Mirth and her Companions. 
Two copies of America and two of Europe are 
water-marked for this year. From October 1814, 
to December 1816, he engraved, signed, and dated 
thirty-eight plates for Flaxman’s Hesiod. About 
1815 he prepared copies of several of his illumi- 
nated books. On October 1, 1815, he engraved 
for Rees’s Cyclopedia a plate in stipple of the 
Laocoén. In 1815-1816 he engraved for the 
same work illustrations for the articles on Armour 
and on Sculpture. About 1816 he drew and en- 
graved eighteen plates for a catalogue of Josiah 
Wedegwood’s porcelain. About 1817, the last of 
the obscure years, he engraved leaflets entitled 
Laocoén, On Homer’s Poetry, and On Virgil. 

Blake’s meeting with John Linnell in 1818 
marks, for his biographers, his emergence from ob- 
scurity and isolation. It was a matter-of-fact 
emergence. Linnell went in that year with “the 

1 Sold at Sotheby’s, November 10, 1924. 

199 


William Blake in This World 


younger Mr. George Cumberland of Bristol” to 
call on him at 17 South Molton Street, where 
he had taken quarters on his return from Felp- 
ham, and where he remained until his removal to 
3 Fountain Court in 1821. ‘We soon became in- 
timate,” wrote Linnell, “and I employed him to 
help me with an engraving of my portrait of Mr. 
Upton, a Baptist preacher, which he was glad to 
do.” In the presence of that portrait, which has 
a solid sound about it, and of its friendly painter, 
Linnell, Blake may be considered safely out of 
the shadows. 

Indeed it is only in contrast with the autobio- 
graphical period preceding 1809 and with the bio- 
graphical period following 1818 that the inter- 
vening years seem obscure. Our knowledge of 
them is as authentic as our knowledge of the 
years from 1757 to 1800. During them there 
was no change in Blake’s lodgings; no break 
in the course of his life; no variation in the 
impression he made on others. Mrs. Blake lived 
with him at 17 South Molton Street after as she 
did before and during these years; during them 
Blake worked on with his graver and his pen; 
during them he continued to be very positive in his 
opinions, and a determined enemy; he exulted 

200 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


over his work like a young disciple; he flew soon 
beyond the ken or sight of such a man as Dibdin 
to his “ ‘third heaven’—flapped by the wings of 
seraphs.” After these years Flaxman, Fuseli, 
Stothard (if we trust his son’s word), Butts, and 
Cumberland knew him as they had known him 
earlier. None of them mentioned what would 
have been to any of them a shock, his confinement 
in a Bedlam cell. 

When, in 1809, Blake dove out of sight of his 
biographers, he left in the wake of his disappear- 
ance the last lines of the Descriptive Catalogue: 
“Tf a man is master of his profession he cannot be 
ignorant that he is so, and if he is not employed 
by those who pretend to encourage art, he will 
employ himself, and laugh in secret at the pre- 
tences of the ignorant, while he has every night 
dropped into his shoe,—as soon as he puts it off, 
and puts out the candle, and gets into bed,—a 
reward for the labours of the day, such as the 
world cannot give... .” Perhaps these words 
are prophetic of his life from the time of the 
Descriptive Catalogue until he was glad to work 
on Linnell’s portrait of Mr. Upton. They, along 
with Mrs. Blake’s serious remark to Kirkup, “I 
have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is 

201 


William Blake in This World 


always in Paradise,” give, I suspect, more reliable 
clues as to his whereabouts from 1809 to 1818 
than does the anonymous article in the Revue 
Britannique. ’ 
Wherever Blake had been from 1809 to 1818, 
he was from 1818 to 1827 neither in Bedlam nor 
always in Paradise. Mrs. Blake had at least some 
of Mr. Blake’s company, as did the Ancients, and 
as did Linnell. Now he desired Linnell to “come 
and take a mutton-chop with us.” Now he carried 
his jug of porter along the Strand without a quiver 
when Sir William Collins at sight of the jug 
stiffened in mid-salute. Now at “a strange party 
of artists and literati and one or two fine folks” 
at Lady Caro Lamb’s, his “countenance radiated” 
as he spoke to Lady Charlotte Bury of his fa- 
vourite pursuit. “TI could not help contrasting this 
humble artist,” said she, “with the great and pow- 
erful Sir Thomas Laurence. . . . Sir T. Laurence 
looked at me several times whilst I was 
talking with Mr. B., and I saw his lips curl with a 
sneer.” Now perhaps he was found by Fuseli with 
a little cold meat before him for dinner. ‘Ah, 
by God,” exclaimed Fuseli, “this is the reason you 
can do as you like. . . . I can’t do this.”” Now he 
stood with Palmer at the Royal Academy “looking 
202 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


up at Wainwright’s picture; Blake in his plain 
black suit and rather broad-brimmed, but not 
Quakerish hat, standing so quietly among all the 
dressed up, rustling, swelling people.’ Now he 
“entered into conversation” so heartily with Lin- 
nell that he did not notice that the coach had 
started, “with some difficulty, bade the coachman 
understand that one of his passengers was unwill- 
ing’ to go,” and was “obligingly permitted .. . 
to [ his] great joy” to get out. Now he kindled at 
the thought, suggested by Palmer, of painting on 
glass for the great west window of the Abbey his 
Sons of God Shouting for Joy. “I could do it,” 
he said. 

In two rooms at 3 Fountain Court, a workroom 
and a showroom, he lived with Mrs. Blake after 
1821. Richmond “to revive his memory,” drew 
a plan of them, beginning with the workroom. 
“The fireplace was in the far right-hand corner 
opposite the window; their bed in the left-hand, 
facing the river; a long engraver’s table stood. 
under the window, . . . a pile of portfolios and 
drawings on Blake’s right near the only cupboard; 
and on the poet-artist’s left a pile of books placed 
flatly one on another; no bookcase . . . not many 
[ pictures | in the workroom, but a good number in 

203 


William Blake in This World 


his showroom, which was rather dark.” Once 
when Richmond, troubled because for a fortnight 
he had found “his invention flag,” came to Foun- 
tain Court he found Blake sitting at tea with Mrs. 
Blake. Richmond related his distress. To his 
astonishment, Blake turned to his wife suddenly 
and said: 

“It is just so with us, is it not, for weeks to- 
gether, when the visions forsake us? What do we 
do then, Kate?” 

“We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.” 

Of the rooms in Fountain Court Palmer and 
Robinson also left descriptions. Palmer found 
Blake “lame in bed, of a scalded foot (or leg). 
There, not inactive, though sixty-seven years old, 
but hard-working on a bed covered with books 
sat he up. . . . Thus and there was he making in 
the leaves of a great book the sublimest designs 
from his Dante. He said he began them with 
fear and trembling. I said, ‘O! I have enough of 
fear and trembling!? ‘Then,’ said he, ‘you’ll do. 
He designed them (100, I think) during a fort- 
night’s illness in bed. . . . And, after visiting 
him, the scene recurs to me afterwards in a kind 
of vision. . . .”. In 1852 Robinson rewrote in his 
Reminiscences in more detail the diary account of 

204 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


his first call at Fountain Court. Blake, he said, 
“was at work engraving in a small bedroom, light, 
and looking out on a mean yard. Everything in 
the room squalid and indicating poverty, except 
himself. And there was a natural gentility about 
him, and an insensibility to the seeming poverty, 
which quite removed the impression. Besides, his 
linen was clean, his hand white, and his air quite 
unembarrassed when he begged me to sit down as 
‘if he were in a palace. There was but one chair 
in the room besides that on which he sat. On my 
putting my hand to it, I found that it would have 
fallen to pieces if I had lifted it, so, as if I had 
been a Sybarite, I said with a smile, ‘Will you let 
me indulge myself?? and I sat on the bed, and 
near him, and during my short stay there was 
nothing in him that betrayed that he was aware of 
what to other persons might have been even offen- 
sive, not in his person, but in all about him. 

“His wife I saw at this time, and she seemed to 
be the very woman to make him happy. She had 
been formed by him. Indeed, otherwise, she could 
not have lived with him. Notwithstanding her 
dress, which was poor and dirty, she had a good 
expression in her countenance, and, with a dark 
eye, had remains of beauty in her youth. She 

205 


William Blake in This World 


had that virtue of virtues in a wife, an implicit 
reverence of her husband. It is quite certain that 
she believed in all his visions. . . . In a word, 
she was formed on the Miltonic model, and like 
the first Wife Eve worshipped God in her hus- 
band, he being to her what God was to him.” 

The rooms in Fountain Court were to Catherine 
the scene not only of tea, of prayer, and of wor- 
ship, but also of night vigil. “His wife being to 
him a very patient woman,” wrote Tatham, “he 
fancied that while she looked on at him as he 
worked, her sitting quite still by his side, doing 
nothing, soothed his impetuous mind; and he has 
many a time, when a strong desire presented itself 
to overcome any difficulty in his plates or draw- 
ings, in the middle of the night risen, and re- 
quested her to get up with him and sit by his side, 
in which she as cheerfully acquiesced.” 

The Ancients sometimes drew Blake away from 
Fountain Court. He went to Brixton to visit 
Calvert, Calvert who made Palmer hate him for 
three days by singing The British Grenadiers. 
When the chimney caught fire and “all was 
flame and convolution of smoke,” Blake’s anx- 
iety was only that Mrs. Calvert should not be 
alarmed. He went down to Shoreham in Kent 

206 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


when the Ancients were established there in the 
spring of 1826. Shoreham was a place then so 
beautiful “it looked as if the Devil had not yet 
found it out.” Palmer and Tatham lived in “Rat 
Abbey,” Richmond in “Earwig Bower,” Calvert 
in “Waterhouse.” Board and lodging for the 
artists averaged eight shillings a week apiece and 
included “books, gold paper, ivory tablets and rare 
tastes of meat.” When Blake came down he was 
accommodated by a neighbour across the way from 
“‘Waterhouse.” He talked, according to the 
Memoir of Edward Calvert, concerning art, in- 
spiration, and “the traverse of sympathy.” He 
visited a haunted house, the ghost in which was 
found to be a snail. “The following evening 
William Blake was occupied at the table in the 
large room, or kitchen. Old Palmer was smoking 
his long pipe in the recess, and Calvert, as was his 
custom, sat with his back to the candles reading. 
Young Samuel Palmer had taken his departure 
more than an hour before for some engagement in 
London. . . . Presently Blake, putting his hand 
to his forehead, said quietly: ‘Palmer is coming; 
he is walking up the road.? ‘Oh, Mr. Blake, he’s 
gone to London; we saw him off in the coach.’ 
Then, after a while, ‘He is coming through the 
207 


William Blake in This World 


wicket—there,’ pointing to the closed door. And 
surely, in another minute, Samuel Palmer raised 
the latch and came in amongst them.”” The coach 
had broken down. 

But the quarter which drew Blake most often 
away from Fountain Court was Linnell’s house in 
Hampstead. With that imaginative power com- 
mon in the lowland Londoner, which makes him 
believe that there is high ground in his city, Blake 
considered Hampstead and its gentle hills “a 
mountainous place,” and believed it and the North 
in general, a “malefic” region for his health. “I 
believe my constitution to be a good one, but it has 
many peculiarities that no one but myself can 
know. When I was young, Hampstead, Highgate, 
Hornsey, Muswell Hill, and even Islington, and 
all places north of London, always laid me up the 
day after. . . . Sir Francis Bacon would say, it 
is want of discipline in mountainous places. Sir 
Francis Bacon is a liar.” Even when Mrs, Linnell 
told him that Hampstead was healthy, he said, “It 
is a lie: it is no such thing.” It was his favourite 
resort. Once at Hampstead, his protests forgotten, 
he listened to Mrs. Linnell’s Scotch songs until his 
eyes filled with tears. He took the children on his 
knee, talked to them gravely yet amusingly, told 

208 








Mow 


Blake and Varley 


Sagittarius crossing ‘Taurus 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


stories, and fell in with and took part in their fun. 
He showed little Hannah Linnell how to make her 
drawing of “a rude face,” into “a human coun- 
tenance.” Possibly he recited to them “Mr. 
Blake’s Nursery Rhyme.” 


The sow came in with the saddle, 

The little pig rocked the cradle, 

The dish jumped o’ top of the table 

To see the brass pot swallow the ladle. 

The old pot behind the door 

Called the kettle a blackamoor, 

“Odd bobbs,” said the gridiron, “can’t you agree? 
I’m the head constable—bring them to me.” 


With the children, said Palmer, he was “a great 
favourite.” 

To the older people at Hampstead his talk 
was “strange and fascinating.” Varley, under 
whom Linnell had studied, was often there, ready 
to explain Blake’s visions astrologically. But his 
explanations did not satisfy Blake, who held 
that the stars could be opposed and conquered. 
“Your fortunate nativity,” he would say to Var- 
ley, “I count the worst.” John Linnell drew the 
two “arguing at Hampstead,” Varley thick, round- 
headed, with protruding eyes and raised finger, 

209 


William Blake in This World 


lecturing away his “Sagittarius crossing Taurus” 
at Blake who sits drawn back a bit, friendly and 
unconvinced. At the end of the visits Rich- 
mond, exalted by his company, walked home 
with him across the fields, or Mrs. Linnell 
wrapped him up in an old shawl, and the servant, 
lantern in hand, lighted him across the heath to 
the main road. 

In the memories of the rooms in Fountain 
Court, at Shoreham, and at Hampstead are hints 
of an old-age idyl: 


The best is yet to be, 
‘The last of life, for which the first was made. 


“Tf asked,” wrote Palmer to Gilchrist, “whether 
I ever knew among the intellectual a happy man, 
Blake would be the only one who would immedi- 
ately occur to me.” “I am quite happy,” said 
Blake to Robinson. 

Life, if the parallel is not pressed too closely, 
might be said to have enforced on Blake a disci- 
pline similar to that it enforced on an old king. 
Like Lear he had been self-willed, arrogant; Lear, 
“every inch a king,” he, “William Blake, a mental 
prince.” Oppression had made each of them in- 
dignant, outrageous. One had learned how 

210 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thank- 
less child; the other had cried on Satan himself 
to explain why a desire for freedom of the imagi-: 
nation, cherished more than life or all that seems 
to make life comfortable, should be made an ob- 
jection to him, “while drunkenness, lewdness, 
gluttony, and even idleness itself, do not hurt other 
men.” In the indignant rage of each was a mix- 
ture of dwelling on wrongs and of vague threats 
of self-assertion and vengeance, of cloudy words 
and of clear statements of deep intuitive truth. 
The parallel would hold in regard to Lear’s new 
sympathy with “houseless heads” and “unfed 
sides.” Blake too found that: 


Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come 
to buy, 

And in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for 
bread in vain. 


Like Lear Blake had been stretched out “upon the 
rack of this tough world.” In a drawing of his 
face by Linnell in 1820 with the ear “low down,” 
away from the face near the back of the neck, 
“showing an immense height of head above”—a 
relation which Richmond said he had seen “finely 
characterized” in three men, Cardinal Newman, 
211 


William Blake in This World 


William Blake, and Henry Hallam—the face 
looks battered, furrowed, drained by the fury of 
his course. The parallel would hold to the last 
act, to the idyllic interval, to the end of the ordeal. 
There Blake, like Lear, was no longer in the storm. 
He was for a brief space seen peaceful and recon- 
ciled: 
so we'll live 
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales. 


Linnell and Catherine, faithful like Kent; the 
Ancients true like Cordelia, were with him to lis- 
ten, and none now to give him scorn! 

To press the parallel, though, would be to fal- 
sify a steadfastness in Blake, a pertinacity that 
defied age and survived discipline. 

His madness, if it is to be so called, did not pass 
with the storm. The faculty of vision which he 
told Robinson he had had from early infancy, he 
carried to his death. To Varley, to the Ancients, 
to Robinson, to Linnell, his latest companions, he 
spoke of his visions as he had spoken to Hayley, 
to Butts, to Flaxman, his earlier companions. 

To Catherine, looking at her most affectionately, 
he said of the last songs he sang: “My beloved, 
they are not mine—no—they are not mine.” 

212 





Blake at Hampstead 


None now to give him scorn 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


His neurotic tendency did not leave him. When 
Linnell suggested that he move permanently to 
Hampstead Blake wrote to him: 

“T have thought and thought of the removal. 
I cannot get my mind out of a state of terrible fear 
at such a step. The more I think, the more I feel 
terror at what I wished at first, and thought a thing 
of benefit and good hope. You will attribute it to 
its right cause—intellectual peculiarity, that must 
be myself alone shut up in myself, or reduced to 
nothing. I could tell you of visions and dreams 
upon the subject. I have asked and entreated 
Divine help; but fear continues upon me, and I 
must relinquish the step that I had wished to take, 
and still wish, but in vain.” 

His quickness to express his scorn of men 
“suilty of mental high treason,” did not 
abandon him. He, who had seen in his thirties 
that “King James was Bacon’s Primum Mobile,” 
that “in Milton, the Father is Destiny, the Son a 
Ratio of the five senses, and the Holy Ghost 
Vacuum,” saw, at seventy, when Dr. Thornton’s 
pamphlet on the Lord’s Prayer fell into his hands, 
that it was a “most malignant and artful attack 
upon the Kingdom of Jesus by the classical learned, 
through the instrumentality of Dr. Thornton.” 

213 


William Blake in This World 


The pamphlet, he thought, was “saying the Lord’s 
Prayer backwards,” and he translated “Doctor 
Thornton’s Tory translation, . . . out of its dis- 
guise in the classical or Scotch language into the 
vulgar English.” His translation ran: 

“Our Father Augustus Cesar who art in these 
thy substantial, astronomical, telescopic heavens, 
holiness to thy name or title, and reverence to thy 
shadow. 

“Thy Kingship come upon earth; then 
in heaven. | 

“Give us day by day our real, substantial, taxed, 
money-bought bread. Deliver us from the Holy 
Ghost, and everything that cannot be taxed. 


“For thine is the kingship, or allegoric godship, 
and the power, or war, and the glory, or law, ages 
after ages, in thy descendants, for God is only an 
allegory of kings and nothing else. Amen.” 

In 1826 he gave Robinson a copy of part of the 
preface to Wordsworth’s Excursion. On Words- 
worth’s lines, 


while my voice proclaims 


How exquisitely the individual Mind 


214 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


. to the external World 
Is fitted—and how exquisitely, too— 
The external World is fitted to the Mind; 


he commented, “You shall not bring me down 
to believe such fitting and fitted. I know better & 
please your Lordship.” 

Most surely his whole-souled giving of himself 
to art, to the business of creation, did not flag. He 
was seen by Allan Cunningham “within a few 
years of his death studying at Somerset House 
with all the ardour of youth.” In 1825, almost 
seventy years old, he began his designs in illustra- 
tion of Dante for Linnell. To be able to read the 
text he set to work upon Italian, as years before 
he had “gone on merrily” by himself in Greek 
and Latin and had at Felpham “read Greek as 
fluently as an Oxford scholar,” and taught himself 
Hebrew. On his Dante designs Palmer found 
him “hard-working.” Illness began to confine 
him, but not to subdue him. He went on “just as 
if perfectly well.’ He found that he could 
“draw as well in bed as up and perhaps better.” 
He was “too much attached to Dante to think 
much of anything else.” He said: “I am still far 
from recovered, and dare not get out in the cold 

215 


William Blake in This World 


air. Yet I lose nothing by it. Dante goes on the 
better, which is all I care about.” 

But though Blake’s heart was bound with triple 
bronze, though he cared only if Dante went on the 
better, his body was growing weak. “I go on with- 
out daring to count on futurity,” he wrote. “I find 
I am not as well as I thought; I must not go on in 
a youthful style.” As he began to be shut indoors 
in Fountain Court, letters had to take the place of 
visits to Hampstead. They carried recurring news 
of “a return of the old shivering fit,? “another 
desperate shivering fit,” “a deadly feel all over the 
limbs,” ‘‘a species of delirium and . . . pain too 
much for thought,” of being “weaker than I was 
aware,” of “being only bones and sinews, all 
strings and bobbins like a weaver’s loom,” of feel- 
ing “like a young lark without feathers.” He had 
“been very near the gates of death,” he wrote to 
Cumberland, “and . . . returned very weak, and 
an old man, feeble and tottering.” 

He had been in this world for seventy years. 
In the schools of Pars, Basire, and Moser he had 
secretly raged and also spoken his mind concerning 
the beginning and the end of art. He had prayed 
God to be delivered from the divinity of yes, and 
no too, that held Englishmen after the French 

216 


Neither in Bedlam Nor Always in Paradise 


Revolution all intermeasurable by one another. In 
the shadow cast by dark Satanic mills he had cried 
that less than all cannot satisfy man. He had 
entreated Cumberland to turn from politics, which 
seemed to him something else besides human life, 
to designing, the one tree of which pleasures are 
the fruit. He had seen money flying from him, 
profit never venturing upon his threshold, though 
every other man’s doorstone was worn down into 
the very earth by the footsteps of the fiends of 
commerce. He had found London a city of assas- 
sinations; he had appreciated Flaxman as he ought, 
and sworn at Fuseli again. He had swung back- 
ward and forward from moods of perfect and en- 
tire confidence to pits of melancholy. He had 
claimed from Hayley his just right as an artist and 
as a man; he had taken Scofield by the elbows and 
pushed him raging and cursing the fifty yards 
from the garden gate to the Fox Inn. He had 
listened to messengers from Heaven daily and 
nightly and at their dictation had composed a poem 
of the intellectual war which he considered the 
grandest poem that this world contains. For even 
one copy of it he had not found a customer. He 
had painted Richard Cceur de Lion at a quarter 
past twelve midnight for Varley, and had told 
217 


William Blake in This World 


Robinson he believed the earth was quite flat. He 
had employed himself and had had every night 
dropped into his shoe as he put out the candle and 
got into bed a reward such as the world cannot 
give. He had knelt down and prayed with Mrs. 
Blake in Fountain Court, and had walked 
across Hampstead Heath, that mountainous place, 
wrapped in Mrs. Linnell’s shawl. 

Where he has been since August, 1827, I do not 
know. At the end of 1826 he told Robinson: “I 
cannot think of death as more than the going out 
of one room into another.” In April of 1827 he 
wrote to Cumberland: “Flaxman is gone, and we 
must soon follow, every one to his own eternal 
house . . . into the mind, in which every one is 
king and priest. . . .” For himself, he told Cum- 
berland, as his foolish body decayed he was 
stronger and stronger in spirit and life, in the real 
man, the imagination, which liveth for ever. 


218 








William Blake’s Life, Works, and Acquaintances 


I 
Life 
1757—Born Nov. 28 


1760 





1767—Studied at Pars’s 
Drawing School 


1770 





1771—Apprenticed to Basire 


1778—Studied under Moser 
1779—Engraved for Johnson 
1780 


1782—Married Catherine Boucher 


1790 


1793—Lived at Hercules Buildings 


1800—Moved to Felpham 





1803—Returned to London 
(South Molton Street) 


1809—Exhibited at Broad Street 
1810 


1820 


1821—Moved to Fountain Court 


1827—Died August 12 


(a)—General Works 








1768-1777—Poetical Sketches 


1788-9—Tiriel 

1789—Thel, Songs of Innocence 
1790—Marriage of Heaven and Hell 
1791—French Revolution 

1792—Song of Liberty : 
1793—Gates of Paradise, Albion, America 
1794—-Songs of Experience, Europe, Urizen 
1795—Book of Los, Ahania, Song of Los 


1797—Four Zoas 





1800-08—Milton 
1800-20—Jerusalem 


1809—Descriptive Catalogue 


1810—Everlasting Gospel. Public Address 


II 


(b) Marginalia to (c) Note Books 





1789—Lavater’s Aphorisms 


1789-93—“Rossetti Manuscript” 
1789—Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels 


(Early Entries) 


1798—Watson’s Apology for the Bible 
1798—Bacon’s Essays 


1800-11—‘‘Rossetti Manuscript” 


(Later Entries) ; 
1801-03—“Pickering Manuscript” 


1808—Reynolds’s Discourses 





1827—Thornton’s The Lord’s Prayer 


1795-1805—George Cum- 





1825-27—George Cum- 


 — a 


el a eS 


IV 


Acquaintances (Italicised names are those 
of casual acquaintances) 


III 


(d) Letters to Illustrations to 
















1780—Thomas Stothard, Henry Fuseli, 


John Flaxman 


1782—John T. Smith, Mrs. Mathew 
1793—Thomas Butts 
1794—George Cumberland 











1791—Mary Wollstonecraft’s 
Original Stories 


berland 


John Trusler 


1796—Bij , 
Thomas Butts urger’s Leonora 


1796-7—Young’s Night Thoughts 


John Flaxman 1800—Gray’s Poems 


1800—William Hayley 
James Blake 
William Hayley 


1802—Hayley’s Ballads 


1805—Richard Cromek 


1805—Blair’s Grave 1806—Thomas Malkin 


1806—The Canterbury Pilgrims 
1807-8—Milton’s Paradise Lost 


1810—Seymour Kirkup 


1815—T. F. Dibdin 


1818—John Linnell 
1819—John Varley 


eg ee 


1824—Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert 
Francis Finch 

1825—George Richmond, Frederick 
Tatham, Henry Crabb Robinson 


1820—Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil 
1821—Book of Job 


’ 


berland 


1825-27—Dante 
John Linnell . 


{ 





‘ 

shal ney 
Pet rane 

a . 








veh f<<-EM 








Table of Sources 
and 
the Index 


Table of Sources 


A. Works of Blake 
1. General Works 
The “Rossetti Manuscript”? (consulted by 
courtesy of Mr. W. A. White, Brook- 
lyn, N. Y.). 
Ellis, Edwin J. The Poetical Works of 
William Blake. 2 Vols. London, 
1906. 
The Real Blake. London, 1907. 
Sampson, John. The Poetical Works of 
William Blake. London, 1913. (Samp- 
son’s edition, as far as it is complete, is 
accepted as the standard text of Blake.) 
2. Marginalia 
Ellis, Edwin J. The Real Blake. Lon- 
don, 1907. (Annotations to Sweden- 
borg’s Divine Wisdom, and to Dr. 
Thornton’s Pamphlet on the Lord’s 
Prayer. ) 
Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William 
Blake. 2 Vols. London, 1863. (An- 
notations to Lavater’s Aphorisms, to 


220 


Table of Sources 


Reynolds’s Discourses, and to Bacon’s 
Essays.) 

Keynes, Geoffrey. Bibliography of Wil- 
liam Blake. Grolier Club, New York, 
1921. (Annotations to Bishop Wat- 
son’s Apology for the Bible.) 

Morley, Edith J. Blake, Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, Lamb, etc., being Selections 
from the Remains of Henry Crabb 
Robinson. Manchester, London, New 
York, 1922. (Annotations to passages 
from Wordsworth, Preface to The Ex- 

cursion and The Recluse.) 

3. Letters | 
Russell, A. G. B. The Letters of Wil- 
liam Blake. London, 1906. (The 
manuscript of a revised enlarged edition 
consulted by courtesy of Mr. Russell.) 
Keynes, Geoffrey. Bibliography of Wil- 
liam Blake. Grolier Club, New York, 
1921. (Appendix III. Letters Hith- 

erto Uncollected. ) 

B. General Sources 

1. Unprinted | 

Cumberland (George, of Bristol). Papers 
in British Museum. 

Flaxman, John. Letters in Fairfax Mur- 
ray Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, 
Cambridge. 

221 


William Blake in This World 


Hayley, William. Letters in Fairfax 
Murray Collection, Fitzwilliam Mu- 
seum, Cambridge. 

London Corresponding Society. Records 
in British Museum. 

2. Printed 

Black, Clementina. The Cumberland 
Letters. London, 1912. 

Blair, Robert. The Grave. ‘To which is 
added a biographical sketch of R. H. 
Cromek. London, 1813. 

Brailsford, H. N. Shelley, Godwin and 
Their Circle. New York, 1913. 

Bray, Mrs. Life of Thomas Stothard. 
London, 1851. 

Briggs, Ada E. Mr. Butts the Friend 
and Patron of Blake. Connoisseur, 
Vol. 19, p. 92 ff., London, 1907. 

Bury, Lady Charlotte. Diary. 4 Vols. 
London, 1839. 

Calvert, Edward, A Memoir of, by his 
Third Son. London, 1893. 

Carey, William. Critical Description of 
“Death on the Pale Horse. London, 
1817. 

Cheetham, James. Life of Thomas 
Paine. New York, 1809. : 

Coleridge, E. H. Letters of 8S. T. Cole- 
ridge. 2 Vols. London, 1895. 

222 


Table of Sources 


Conway, Moncure D. Life of Thomas 
Paine. 2 Vols. London and New 
York, 1893. 

Cumberland, George. Thoughts on Out- 
line. London, 1796. 

Cunningham, Allan. The Cabinet Gal- 

lery of Pictures. 2 Vols. London, 
1833. 
Lives of the Most Eminent British 
Painters; Sculptors, and Architects. 
6 Vols. London, 1829-1833. (Vol. II 
—Life of Blake. Life of Fuseli. Vol. 
IJI—Life of Flaxman.) 

Damon, S. Foster. Wéalliam Blake: His 
Philosophy and Symbols. Boston and 
New York, 1924. . 

Dibdin, Thomas F. Reminiscences of a 
Literary Life. 2 Parts. London, 1836. 
The Library Companion. 2 Vols. Lon- 
don, 1824. 

Elton, Oliver. A Survey of English Lit- 
erature, 1780-1830. 2 Vols. London, 
1912. 

Farington, Joseph. Diary. Ed. James 
Greig. New York, 1923. 

Finch, Mrs. E. Memorials of Francis 
Oliver Finch. London, 1865. 

was 


William Blake in This World 


Fitzgerald, Edward. Letters. 2 Vols. 
London, 1894. 

Flaxman, John. Lectures on Sculpture. 
With a Memoir of the Author. Lon- 
don, 1865. 

Foster, John. Walter Savage’ Landor. 
2 Vols. London, 1869. 

Gilchrist, H. H. Anne Gilchrist: Her 
Life and Writings. London, 1887. 
Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of Wiailliam 
Blake. 2 Vols. London, 1863. ‘‘New 
and enlarged edition.” 2 Vols. Lon- 
don, 1880. Another edition. 1 Vol. 
London and New York, 1907. Another 
, edition. 1 Vol. New York, 1922. 

V Grierson, H. J. C. Wiailliam Blake’s De- 
signs for Gray's Poems. London, 1922. 

Hazlitt, William. Vol. VII of Collected 
Works. Ed. Waller and Glover, 
London and New York, 1903. 

Hazlitt, William (editor). Memoirs of 
the late Thomas Holcroft. 3 vols. 
London, 1816. 

Hogg, David. Life of Allan Cunning- 
ham. Dumfries, Glasgow, Edinburgh, 
London, 1875. 

Jenkins, Herbert (“H. Ives”). The Trial 
of Wilham Blake for High Treason. 

224 


Table of Sources 


Nineteenth Century. Vol. LXVII, pp. 
849-861. London, May, 1910. 

Johnson, John. Memoirs of the Life and 
Writings of William Hayley. 2 Vols. 
London, 1823. 

Knowles, John. Life and Writings of 
Henry Fuseli. 3 Vols. London, 1831. 

Lucas, E. V. Works of Charles and 
Mary Lamb. Vol. VII. London, 1905. 

Lytton, E. G. (Bulwer-Lytton). The 
Student. 2 Vols. London, 1835. 

Malkin, Benjamin Heath. A Father’s 
Memoirs of His Child. London, 1806. 

Morley, Edith J. Blake, Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, Lamb, etc. Being Selections 
from the Remains of Henry Crabb Rob- 
inson. London, 1922. (Quotations 
from Robinson in Wéilliam Blake in 
This World are modernised in spelling | 
and to some extent in punctuation.) 

Oldys, Francis (George Chalmers). The 
Life of Thomas Paine. London, 1793. 

Palmer, A. H. Life and Letters of Sam- 
uel Palmer. London, 1892. 

Paul, C. K. William Godwin and His 
Friends and Contemporaries. Boston, 
1876. 

Reid, T. Wemyss. The Life of Richard 

225 


William Blake in This World 


Monckton Milnes. 2 Vols. London, 
1890. 

. Ritson, Joseph. Letters. 2 Vols. Lon- 
don, 1833. 

Rossetti, W. M. The Poetical Works 
of Wilkam Blake, with a Prefatory 
Memoir. London, 1874. 

Russell, A. G. B. The Letters of Wil- 
liam Blake. ‘Together with a life by 
Frederick Tatham. London, 1906. 

Sadler, Thomas. Diary, Reminiscences, 
and Correspondence of Henry Crabb 
Robinson. 2 Vols. London and New 
York, 1872. 

Sélincourt, Basil de. William Blake. Lon- 
don and New York, 1909. 

Smith, John Thomas. 4 Book for a Rainy 
Day. London, 1905. 

Nollekens and His Times. 2 Vols. 
London, 1828. (Vol. II—Biographical 
Sketches of Fuseli, Flaxman, Blake.) 

Smith, R. C. The Royal Book of Fate. 
London, 1856. 

Story, Alfred T. James Holmes and 
John Varley. London, 1894. 

Life of John Linnell. 2 Vols. Lon- 
don, 1892. 

Symons, Arthur. William Blake. Lon- 

226 


Table of Sources 
don and New York, 1907. (Reprints 


extracts from Henry Crabb Robinson’s 
Diary, Letters and Reminiscences; Lady 
Charlotte Bury’s Diary; Varley’s Zo- 
diacal Physiognomy. Reprints in full 
J. T. Smith’s Biographical Sketch of 
Blake; Allan Cunningham’s Life of 
Blake.) 

Trusler, John. Memoirs. Bath, 1806. 

Varley, John. 4 Treatise on Zodiacal 
Physiognomy. London, 1828. 

C. Bibliographies of Blake.’ 

Berger, P. William Blake, Poet and 
Mystic. (Translated by D. H. Conner.) 
Pp. 385-402. London, 1914. 

Keynes, Geoffrey. Bibliography of Wil- 
liam Blake. Grolier Club, New York, 
1921, 

Sampson, John. The Poetical Works of 
William Blake. Bibliographical Intro- 
duction, pp. XV-LII. London, 1913. 

Wallis, J. P. R. Cambridge History of 
English Literature. Vol. XI, pp. 474- 
479. New York, 1914. 


227 


INDEX 


Additions to Blake’s Catalogue 
of Pictures, 123, 198 

Aders, Mrs., 164, 165, 167, 171 

Advertisements to  Blake’s 
Canterbury Pilgrims, 123, 
198 

America, 31, 33-34, 199 

Ancient of Days, The, 7 

“Ancients, The,” 158-161, 162, 
185, 186, 202, 206, 207, 212 

Apostles, 146 

Auguries of Innocence, 47-48 


cere Francis, 142, 165, 208, 

Banks, Thomas, 61 

Barton, Bernard, 182 

Basire, James, 12, 13, 19, 20, 
216 

Bastille, 23 

Bédier, Joseph, Tristan and 
Tseult, 86 

Bedlam Hospital, 191, 192, 194, 
201, 202 

Benét, William Rose, 190 

Blair, Robert, 71 

Blair, Robert, The Grave, 
Blake’s Illustrations to, 64, 
70, Fer el 17 

Blake, Catherine Boucher, 1, 4, 
13, 14, 15, 19, 54, 69, 79, 
162, 169, 172, 174, 175, 195, 
200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 
206, 212, 218 

Blake, Ellen, 4 

Blake, James, 14, 69, 95, 132 

Blake, John, 118, 129 


Blake, Robert, 118, 129, 174, 
176 


Blake, William, anecdotes con- 
cerning, 3-9; outline of life, 
6; authorities for childhood, 
9-11; early education in art, 
11-13; marriage, 13-16; at 
Mrs. Mathew’s, 16-18; To 
the Muses, 17-18; Poetical 
Sketches, 17-18; “firm per- 
suasion,” 19-22; opinion of 
engravers and of artists, 20; 
An Island in the Moon, 21; 
at time of French Revolu- 
tion, 25-27; relations with 
Godwin and Paine, 26-31; 
Annotations to Watson’s 
Apology for the Buble, 29- 
31; myth of revolution, 31- 
38; summary of revolution- 
ary attitude, 37-38; attitude 
towards industrial mechani- 
cal revolution, 39-51; Songs 
of Innocence and Songs of 
Experience, 42-47; Auguries 
of Innocence, 47-48 ; on com- 
merce, politics, and art, 52- 
53; his industry and expec- 
tations, 54-56; relations with 
Flaxman, 56-63; relations 
with Fuseli, 63-67; disap- 
pointments, 67-70; resent- 
ment at Cromek, Stothard, 
Reynolds, 70-75; defiance of 
circumstance, 75-77; period 
of autobiography in letters, 
78-86; moods of his whole 


228 


Index 


life, 86-88; a neurotic, 89- 
90; relations with Hayley, 
91-101; trial for treason, 
102-108; visionary life, 109- 
131; correspondence with 
Trusler, 113-115; letters to 
and from Felpham, 115-121; 
public statements, 121-128; 
summary of aspects of vi- 
sionary life, 129-131; “a 
grand poem” dictated by au- 
thors in eternity, 131-149; its 
form, 134-135; its themes, 
135-149; biographical period 
of Blake’s life, 149-190; R. 
C. Smith and John Varley, 
151-158; “The Ancients,” 
158-161; John Linnell, 161- 
163; Henry Crabb Robinson, 
164-172; Allan Cunningham 
and J. T. Smith, 172-180; 
passing comments, 180-184; 
variety of his character, 185- 
186; exaggeration of his 
qualities, 186-188; question 
of his madness, 188-190; re- 
port of his incarceration in 
Bedlam, 191-193; years of 
“obscurity,” 193-201; 1818- 
1827, 202-218; in Fountain 
Court, 203-206; at Shore- 
ham, 206-208; at Hamp- 
stead, 208-210; comparison 
with Lear, 210-212; stead- 
fastness and pertinacity, 212- 
216; growing weakness, 216; 
seventy years of life, 216- 
218; view of death, 218 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 52, 53, 
68, 105 

British Institution, 67 

Brixton, 206 

Broad Street, 72 

Brown, Ford K., 29 n. 

Browning, Robert, 38 


Bunhill Fields Cemetery, 191 

Burke, Edmund, 37 

Burns, Robert, 11 

Bury, Lady Charlotte, 202 

Butcher, Thomas Monger, 14 

Butts, Thomas, 3, 81, 116, 117, 
119, 132, 188, 195, 201, 212 

ee Lord, 38, 91, 92, 181, 


Caiaphas, 143 

Calvert, Edward, 158, 159, 162, 
189, 206, 207; Christian 
Ploughing the Last Furrow 
ae Life, 159; Memoir of, 
20 


Calvert, Mrs. Edward, 206 


_ Canterbury Pilgrims, 182, 198 


feed William Paulet, 197- 

98 

Carlyle, Thomas, 55, 175 

Cassibelane, 163 

Chaining of Orc, 199 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 182 

Chesterton, Gilbert, 50 

Chichester, 98, 102, 106 

Chimney Sweeper, The, 182 

Christie’s, 11 

Coleridge, E. H., 180 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 18, 
23, 24, 37, 106, 172, 180, 181; 
Lyrical Ballads, 17 

Collins, Sir William, 202 

Corinna, 153 

Sitio Antonio, 126, 129, 
1 

Cowper, William, 23, 24, 52; 
Hayley’s Life of, 116 

Cromek, R. H., 70, 71, 73, 76, 
108, 123 

Cumberland, George, 28, 52, 


87, 133, 175, 188, 201, 216, 
217, 218 
Cumberland, George, the 


younger, 200 


229 


William Blake in This World 


Cunningham, Allan, 153, 154, 
156, 172, 175, 178, 186, 215; 
Life of Blake, 173, 175-178, 
192; Lives of the Most Emi- 
nent British Painters, Sculp- 
tors, and Architects, 172; 
The Cabinet Gallery of Pic- 
tures, 178 


Damon, Foster, 193 

Dante, 165, 166 

Dante, Illustrations to, 56n.,, 
162, 171, 204, 215, 216 

Descriptive Catalogue of Pic- 
tures, 72, 123, 133, 177, 182, 
199, 201 

Dibdin, Thomas, 195, 196, 201; 
Decameron, 195, 196; Remi- 
niscences, 196 


Dryden, John, 152 


Edward the First, 157 
Edward the Third, 192 
Egremont, Countess of, 122 
Ellis, Edwin J., The Real 
Blake, 4, 5, 26, 27, 28 
Ensom, William, 198 
Erasmus, Desiderius, 12 
Europe, 31, 34, 199 
Everlasting Gospel, The, 198 
Examiner, The, 71, 72, 122, 
150, 189 
Ezekiel, 9 


Fairfax Murray Collection, 
Fitzwilliam Museum, 57 n., 
91 n. 

Felpham, 6, 59, 60, 62, 68, 78, 
79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 93, 
94, 95, 97, 99, 100, 108, 116, 
ac 132; 1353, 150,176,200, 
2 

“Felpham Gospel,” 133, 134 

Finch, Francis, 158, 159-160, 
189 


ae Edward, 181, 183, 

18 

Flaxman, John, 16, 17, 27, 56- 
63, 66, 67, 68, 71, 76, 79, 80, 
87, 89, 91, 116, 164, 170, 171, 
172, 188, 196, 197, 201, 212, 
217, 218; Hesiod, 199 

Flaxman, Maria, 94 

Fountain Court, 3, 159, 162, 
168, 191, 200, 203, 204, 205, 
206, 208, 210, 216, 218 

French Revolution, 25, 26, 27, 
28, 31, 39, 216 

French Revolution, The, 25, 
27, 31, 35-36 

Fuseli, Harriet, 63, 64 

Fuseli, Henry, 16, 49, 56, 58, 
63-67, 68, 71, 90, 188, 195, 
196, 201,° 202, .217; Satan 
Building the Bridge over 
Chaos, 65; Milton, 65; 
Azgisthus, 65; Count Ugo- 
lino, 65; Lycidas, 196 


Gabriel, the archangel, 179, 180 

Gardner, J. (vicar), 14. 

Gates of Paradise, 198 

acral the Third, 24, 52, 
0 

Ghost of a Flea, The, 154-156, 
158, 185 

Gibbon, Edward, 143 

Gilchrist, Alexander, Life of 
William Blake, 3, 5, 16, 21, 
ou 26, 29, 30, 173, 184, 193, 

Giles, John, 158 

Godwin, William, 26, 28, 29 

Gospel, 146, 147 

Gotzenberger, Jakob, 171 

Gray, Thomas, 59 

Greek, 215 


Hallam, Henry, 212 
Hamlet, 109, 190 


230 


Index 


Hampstead, 158, i, 185, 208, 
209, 210, 213, 216, 218 

Hayley, William, 59, 61, 
70 n., 79, 90, 91- 101, 107, 18 
116, "120, Toe, eid, 2i7 ; 
Triumphs of Temper, 69, 92, 
94; Ballads, 94; Life of 
Cowper, 94, 116 

Hazlitt, William, 181, 183; On 
the Old Age of Artists, 183 

Heine, Heinrich, 149 

Hercules Buildings, 3, 5, 59 

Herod, 154 

Holy Ghost, 146 

Holy Thursday, in Songs of 
Innocence, 43-44; in Songs 
of Experience, 44-45 

Homer’s Poetry, On, 199 

Hunt, Richard, 71, 123 

Huntington Library, 29. 


Industrial-mechanical revolu- 
tion, 39 

Irving, Edward, 165 

Island in the Moon, 21, 43, 174 

Italian, 215 

Italy, 57, 68 


Jerusalem, 133, 136-149, 164, 


97. 
Jesus, 2, 143, 147, 148, 165, 170 
Job, Illustrations to, 7, 56n,, 
162 


Johnson, Joseph, 16, 26, 27, 63 
Judgement of Paris, 198 


Keynes, Geoffrey, 167, 193 


Kirkup, Seymour, 111, 194, 
195, 201 

Lais, 153 

Lamb, The, 47 

Lamb, Charles, 181, 182, 


186, 189, 191, 197 
Lamb. Lady Caroline, 202 


Landor, Walter Savage, 181, 
184, 185, 186 

Langford, Abraham, 11, 12 

Laocoon, The, 65, 195, 199 

ling udgement, The, 122, 126, 


1 
Latin, 215 
Laurence, Sir Thomas, 202 
Lavater, Johann, Aphorisms, 
49 


Lear, King, 210, 211, 212 

Le Brun, Charles, 20 

Linnell, Hannah, 209 

Linnell, John, 161-163, 164, 
166, 173, 185, 186, 187, 189, 
192, 199, 200, 202, 203, 208, 
209, 211, 212, 213. 215 


_ Linnell, Mrs. John, 208, 210, 


218 
Locke, John, 21, 28, 109, 141, 
142, 165 


ann 42-43 

London Insane_Asylum, The 
(article an Revue Britan- 
nique), 1 

London M pissy 133 

London University Magazine, 
181 

Lot, 178 

Louvre, the, 68 

Lowell, Amy, 15, 56n., 70n. 

Lytton, Edward R. (Bulwer- 
Lytton), 181, 184, 185, 186 


Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 
Metin, Benjamin Heath, 9, 11, 
Man who Built the Pyramids, 
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 
Steck the incendiary, 191 


Marvell, Andrew, 90 
Masquerier, John James, 197 


231 


William Blake in This World 


Mathew, Mrs. Henry, 11, 16, 
19,59. 97,-172 

Mathew, Reverend Henry, 17, 
21, 58 

Memoir of Edward Calvert, 
207 


“Mercy, Pity, Peace,” 46, 47 

Michelangelo, 3, 20, 67, 152, 
170, 178, 179, 192 

Milton, 56n., 133, 136-149 

Milton, John, 38, 52, 55, 129, 
144, 152, 171, 185, 196, 213; 
Paradise Lost, 171 

Mirth and Her Companions, 


199 
Monthly Magazine, 65 
Moser, George M., 12, 13, 19, 
20, 97, 216 
Moses, 192 
Robert 


clerk), 14 
Muses, To the, 17-18 


(parish 


Newman, Cardinal, 211 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 28, 109, 141, 
142, 165 


O’Neil, Shawn, 5 
Orc, 32, 38 


Paine, Tom, 26, 29, 30, 31, 49 

Palmer, Samuel, 158, 159, 160, 
161, 162, 168, 187, 188, 189, 
192, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207, 
208, 209, 210, 215; Naomi, 
159, 160; Ruth, 160; Artist’s 
Home, 161 

Pars, Henry, 12, 19, 216 

Peace of Amiens, 68 

Peckham Rye, 9 

Phidias, 194 

Phillips, Thomas, 71, 178, 179, 
196, 198 

Philoctetes and Neoptolemos 
at Lemnos, 199 


Pindar, 153 

Plato, 165 

Poetical Sketches, 17, 42 — 

Pope, Alexander, 190; Eloise 
to Abelard, 64 

Prologue and Characters of 
Chaucer’s Pilgrims, 199 

Prophets, 124 


Public, To the, 55 


Raphael, Sanzio, 12, 152, 170, 
178 


Rasselas, 190 

Rathbone Place, 16, 20, 59 

Reed’s Cyclopedia, 199 . 

Reign of Terror, 23 

Revue Britanmque, 191, 192, 
202 ' 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 3, 57, 75, 
109; Discourse, 28, 72, 74, 75 

ere Coeur de Lion, 157, 
21 

Richmond, George, 158, 159, 
160, 162, 187, 189, 192, 203, 
204, 207, 210, 211; Abel the 
Shepherd, 159 

Robinson, Henry Crabb, 58, 62, 
112, 133, 164-172, 181, 182, 
185, 186, 189, 197, 204, 210, 
212, 214, 218; Journal, 164; 
Reminiscences, 204 

Rogers, Samuel, 165 

Rome, 67 

Romney, George, 67, 93, 95, 
120, 129 

Rose, Samuel, 106 

Rossetti Manuscript, 72, 73, 
76, 87, 99-101, 198 

Rossetti, W. M., 26 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 68, 
142 

Royal Academy, 12, 20, 58, 63, 
64, 65, 67, 194, 202 

Royal Hospital for Insane, see 
Bedlam 


232 


Index 


Royal Society of Arts, 198 

Rubens, Peter Paul, 20, 126, 
129, 177 

Ruskin, John, 8, 50 

Ryland, William W., 9 


St. Paul’s Churchyard, 26 
Sampson, John, 193 

Satan, 143, 144 

pean Prous, 71, 72, 76, 


Scofield, John, 102, 103, 106, 

107, 217 

Scott, Sir Walter, 181, 189 

Selincourt, Basil de, 193 

Shakespeare, William, 8, 55, 
129, 185 

Sharp, William, 197 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 2, 38 

Shoreham, 206, 210 

Smith, John Thomas (“Rainy- 
Day”), 10-11, 13, 16, 20, 54, 
hese, i772, 173, 175, 186; 
Nollekens and His Times, 
172; Biographical Sketch of 
Blake, 172-174 

Smith, R. 158-152, 153, 157; 
158, 161, 185, 186. 

Socrates, 170 

Song of Liberty, 31, 32-33 

Song of Los, 31, 36 

ag of Experience, 42, 43 
4 


Songs of Innocence, 7, 43, 45, 
47, 197 

Sons of God Shouting for 
Joy, 203 

Southcott, Joanna, 197 

Southey, Robert, 24, 37, 92, 94, 
133, 164, 180, 181, 187 

South Molton Street, 191, 200 

Spencer, George John, Earl, 
198 


St. Mary’s Battersea, 14, 15 
Stothard, Thomas, 71, 73, 76, 


95, 201; Pilgrimage to Can- 

terbury, 71, 72-73, 182 
Strange, Sir Robert, 20 
Sussex Advertiser, 107 
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 165 
Swedenborgianism, 58 
Swinburne, Algernon C., 111 
syne, Arthur, 17, 78, 79, 

3 


Tatham, Frederick, 9-10, 158, 
189, 207; Life of William 
Blake, 9-10, 11, 19, 49, 54, 
30 66, 158, 160, 187, 195, 


Thel, 47 

Thornton, Dr. R. J., Pamphlet 
on the Lord’s Prayer, 213- 
14 


ee 

Tiger, The, 7, 47, 182 

Tiriel, 47 

Titian, 125, 129, 177, 194 

Truchsession Gallery, 84, 85, 
88 

Trusler, John, 113, 115 

Tyler, Wat, 157 


Upcott, William, 88 

Upton, Mr., a Baptist preach- 
er, 200, 201 

Urania, 151, 152 


Varley, John, 151, 152-153, 
155,156,157, 158,161) 162, 
173, 177, 183, 185, 186, 192, 
209, 212, 217 

Victoria, Queen, 8 

Virgil, On, 199 

Visionary Heads, 153, 157, 163, 
7192 

a 21, 68, 141, 142, 143, 
171 


Wainwright, Thomas G., 133, 
203 


233 


\ 


William Blake in This World 


Wallace, William, 157 
Washington, George, 52 
Watson, Bishop, Apology for 
the Bible, 28, 29-31 
Wedgwood, Josiah, 199 
West, Sir Benjamin, 64; 
eo on the Pale Horse, 
9 
Westminster Abbey, 19, 203 
Whitman, Walt, 1, 2 
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 64 
Woollett, William, 20 


Wordsworth, Dorothy, 166, 181: 

Wordsworth, William, 18, 24, 
37, 48, 165, 180, 181, 182, 
184, 186, 189; Lyrical Bal- 
lads, 17; The Excursion, 
166, 214 


Yeats, William Butler, 4 
Young, Edward, Night 
Thoughts, 179 


Zodiacal Physiognomy, 155 


THE END 


2.34. 








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